Milk

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
1.1
(Richard Lydekker,
Royal Natural History
[vol. 2], 1894)
1.2
(Richard Lydekker,
Wild Oxen, Sheep, and Goats
, 1898),
1.4
and
1.5
(John G. Wood,
Our Living World
[American edition], 1885),
2.4
(William Youatt,
Cattle
, 1834),
5.3
and
5.11
(John Lockwood Kipling,
Beast and Man in India
, 1891)

COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS:
1.3
(Jean Francois Champollion,
Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie
, p. 1844–99),
1.6
(
Illustrated London News
, 1864),
1.7
(Edward Moor,
The Hindu Pantheon
, 1810),
1.8
and
2.5
(Charles Louis Flint,
Milch Cows and Dairy Farming
, 1858),
2.1
(George W. Thornbury,
Old and New London
[vol. 4], 1872),
2.3
(
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
, May 15, 1858),
6.4
(
Magasin pittoresque
, 1837)

THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
1.9
(
The Cries of New York
, 1845 edition, NYHS negative #54406),
2.2
(
Harper’s Weekly
, August 17, 1878, NYHS negative #80839d)

THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA
4.1
(
Australian Illustrated Weekly
, November 11, 1893)

RALPH SELITZER,
The Dairy Industry in America
, 1976
5.1
,
5.9
,
5.10

HEDWIG DORN,
Zur Stütze der Hausfrau
, 1918
5.5
,
5.8
,
5.12
,
6.7
,
6.8
,
8.3

Preface

A Note on Shopping Sources

Acknowledgments

Select Bibliography

Index

T
his book has grown out of a lifelong love of milk and fresh dairy products. It is the culinary guidebook, dairy-chemistry-for-cooks primer, and eclectic recipe collection that I always vainly wished somebody had written. And it developed into something else that I’d always wanted to find: a geographical-historical exploration of the world’s milky ways, including those that have shaped the modern American milk supply for better or worse.

Milk itself would have been a fascinating subject at any time in history. It is really and truly the First Food, at least for all members of the mammal class. The practice of milking was an anchor of many prehistoric civilizations, one of humanity’s oldest and deepest bonds with domestic animals. The animals raised for the purpose are remarkable creatures, though they remain nearly invisible to most of the people who put milk on shopping lists. What they produce is a biochemical marvel that modern science has not yet finished analyzing. Its still-unplumbed complexities are exactly what make it irreplaceable in a huge number of the world’s cuisines. In the ancient world it often had religious significance as a ritual offering; in
India it still has sacred associations. On a more earthbound level, it has figured tremendously in the farm econo-mies of most industrialized nations.

But I’m not sure that any previous historical juncture would have been an equally fruitful—or fraught—moment for stepping back to survey the many dimensions of milk, especially in the United States. It gets lots of headlines these days, some of them pleasanter reading than others. Among the most striking features of the early twenty-first-century dairy scene are:

My entry point to enlightenment was
yogurt—not what I’d known from American pop versions but the plain creamy yogurt that kept turning up as sauce, drink, condiment, and just all-around player in small Greek, Bosnian, Turkish, Israeli, Persian, Afghan, and Indian restaurants. Slowly it dawned on me that in simple fermented yogurt I was tasting something that might have been eaten or drunk by Old Testament patriarchs, Sumerian lawgivers, Homeric heroes, Hindu gods, or the flower of Persian chivalry. The uses I saw it being put to in modest little eateries made me realize how little I’d really known about cooking with milk and dairy products.

As the larger picture opened up to me and I began trying to delve into chapters of the culinary past that no one else seemed to have written, I gradually arrived at a thoroughly rearranged world view of milk and things made from it.

In the first place, for most people in most parts of the world, milk has always been not a blandly innocuous food but one with decided flavors of its own. Historically it has come from not only
cows—which give the mildest-tasting milk of any dairy animal—but many other creatures, suited to different climates and geographies, whose milk has distinctive flavors peculiar to their species. (
Goats’ milk is probably the most familiar example in the United States.) Furthermore, sweet milk—“sweet” in the sense of “
unsoured”—is not really as old a part of systematic foodways as milk fermented by friendly
bacteria. Since prehistory, most of the milk consumed in all dairying regions of the world has been soured into yogurt or forms resembling today’s cultured buttermilk. After all,
fermentation is what happens to milk within a short time of milking unless you artificially forestall the event through refrigeration. And if you keep up with the story of lactose
intolerance, you will realize that more human beings can more easily digest soured than sweet milk. To use an often-abused
word, soured
milk is in a very real sense a more “natural” food for people past the age of weaning. Just as crucial from a cook’s point of view, soured milk plays off against other flavors with a many-dimensioned verve that’s missing in the sweet counterpart.

Similarly, fresh
cheeses made by a few simple forms of curd-setting are not just primitive precursors of “real” cheeses that have been ripened or
aged. They are both older and more globally important than any other kinds of cheese. In their own right they are anything but blah and monotonous. Since ancient times they have been marked by infinite nuances of flavor and texture, depending on local environments, the animals that provide the milk, and the manner in which the curd is set. Fresh cheeses preserved through
brining, like the Greek variety we call
feta, are also more ancient than European-style ripened ones and figure prominently throughout a wider geographical range—in fact, most of the same geographical range as
yogurt.

In the long territorial stretch of the Old World that I came to think of as “Yogurtistan,” people have until recently been much closer than we are to the primal origins of both dairying and cooking with dairy foods. The
Indian subcontinent also preserves more links with an ancient past. So do the
Russian reaches of western Asia along with adjacent Eastern Europe; the dominant form of sour milk there isn’t yogurt, but continuity still exists with a tradition in which milk was almost invariably fermented before people thought of consuming it or cooking with it. The big global exceptions to the pattern today are northwestern Europe,
Great Britain, and several parts of the world—including North America—that became British or French colonies. In the mother countries something happened, only a few centuries ago, to start a huge commercial concentration on two forms of milk that had been little known, or even unknown, among other dairying peoples. They were fresh unsoured milk and its linear opposite: ripened or aged cheese.

Before this switch of direction, there hadn’t been anything remarkably odd about these regions except that they had a high proportion of people with the globally rare ability to digest the lactose in sweet milk throughout their adult lives—a genetic fluke that didn’t stop sour milk and fresh cheeses from being cornerstones of household dairying for centuries or, more likely, millennia. But after cheeses proliferated as specialties destined for particular markets and sweet milk for drinking began to be produced in large volumes for urban clienteles, northwestern Europe and Britain never looked back. (The first change happened about four or five hundred years ago, the second toward the start of the nineteenth century.) It’s this heritage that has chiefly shaped American perceptions of dairy foods.