Authors: Anne Mendelson
Milk (16 page)
Now, what exactly have you proved by all these exertions? After all, anyone can buy the results of the foregoing experiments (or nearly all of them) as separate products. Most of them won’t taste as good, but doesn’t the convenience of being able to get ready-made butter, skim milk, and so forth compensate for some small loss of quality?
Well, yes and no. If you’ve eaten good fresh dairy products, you’ll know that the loss of quality is not small. But there’s something else at issue here. You started out with
one single batch of milk
that was as close as practicable to the state in which it emerged from the cow. (True, it was pasteurized, but that didn’t greatly impair its fitness for our purposes.) The amount was not huge. But through an alchemy not hopelessly beyond everyday American kitchens, it supplied you with not only delicious
whole milk but wonderful fresh cream, skim milk fit to drink with pleasure rather than resignation, refreshing soured skim milk, nutrient-rich curd and whey (whose versatility I’ve barely hinted at), a bit of truly lovely butter, and a tantalizing soupçon of real buttermilk. It could have yielded still other transformations—for instance, yogurt, yogurt “cheese,” junket, pot cheese and several other fresh cheeses, or clotted cream. Some of these can also be made from the so-called whole milk that we’re all familiar with—it bears repeating that by no stretch of the imagination is commercial U.S. whole milk really whole—or from other standard offerings in the supermarket dairy case. But they are better when they are, so to speak, mined from the original ore that is true whole milk.
Why should all the white magic be left to the big dairy processors and not the home cook? It’s as if the only way people could buy wheat were as cake flour, prepackaged cake mix, biscuit mix, white sauce mix, frozen bread dough, flavored instant bulgur, and so forth. How could any cook ever learn to understand what wheat itself is all about? How could any consumer ever fathom the sheer wastefulness of a corporate machinery geared up to make one of the world’s most ancient foods available only in the form of superspecialized products
meant to fill arbitrary little retail-sales slots, while excluding the incredibly versatile basic material that could furnish better homemade versions of them all?
Since none of us lives in some ideal realm of pristine ingredients, most of my recipes are based on easily obtainable versions of cows’ milk, butter, and so forth. But I would like users of this book to keep thinking of the tangible, tastable culinary magic that is ancient applied dairy chemistry. Not so long ago, millions of ordinary people could readily perform this magic in their own homes. We still should be able to recapture it. If more cooks understand that they, too, can manipulate the miraculous complexities of milk to splendid culinary purpose, their voices may move the American dairy industry to bring us the basic substance in less technologically manhandled and denatured form.
MILK AND
CREAM
Label Babel: Buying Milk and Cream
Cream, Whipped and Unwhipped: Some Thoughts
“White Sauce” or Sauce Béchamel Maigre
Ají de Leche (Venezuelan Milk-Chile Infusion)
“Corn Kees” (Gujarati Stovetop Corn Pudding)
Irish Champ (Mashed Potatoes with Milk and Greens)
Creamed Spinach, Madame Saint-Ange (Épinards à la Crème)
Vanilla Ice Cream I: Custard-Based
Vanilla Ice Cream II: Philadelphia-Style
Crème Anglaise (Stirred Custard)
Cajeta Mexicana (Mexican Dulce de Leche)
Dulce de Leche with Canned Condensed Milk
Batidos (Latin American Milkshakes)
Hoppelpoppel: Eggnog with a Difference
T
o most American cooks, the idea of ordinary milk or cream as a vehicle of vivid or concentrated flavors comes as a surprise. We’re more used to encountering them in gentle contexts where no one expects them to be anything but bland, and where that quality can be seen as a virtue. Indeed, sometimes it
is
a virtue. But there’s a lot more to milk-based cookery than mild-mannered innocuousness.
A simple first step for starting to think outside the box: Take about two cups of milk—any kind from skim to whole will do—and a few ounces of strong-flavored smoked fish like chub, whitefish, Finnan haddie, or kippered herring. If none of these is easy to find, substitute a chopped raw onion. Put the fish or onion in a small dish, pour the milk over it, and let sit for four to twelve hours, well covered, in the refrigerator or at room temperature.
Strain the milk through a fine mesh sieve and taste it. It will have picked up either a distinct fishy-smoky edge or an equally definite pungency from the onion. Even plain water will leach out salt from foods, but water doesn’t have the property of becoming subtly and complexly infused with
other essences. One of milk’s signature qualities is the tenacity with which its more volatile or reactive components latch on to reactive counterparts in more strongly flavored foods. This really should be considered a useful talent. Your fishy or oniony milk would make a wonderful cooking liquid—say, as part of a roux-based milk sauce or the foundation of a chowder.
As this mini-exercise suggests, American cooks usually have very limited experience in exploiting some fascinating aptitudes of plain milk and cream. Models of suavity and creaminess we have aplenty, and I’m certainly not turning up my nose at those qualities or planning to forgo demurely luscious incarnations of milk such as whipped cream. But it must be said that the familiar English- or French-derived uses of unsoured milk or cream seldom are notable for piquancy, intensity, or multidimensional verve. Probably our most notable milk-based dishes are sweetened puddings, which can be excellent but represent only a tiny fraction of what we could be doing.
Opportunities for enlarged horizons have become more obvious as America has become progressively enriched by the cooking traditions of new immigrants, and will be still more so in years to come. Recent arrivals from northern India have introduced millions of us to the firm cheeselike delicacy—not a true cheese—that is called
panir or
chhenna and eaten in marvelously spiced sauces.
Clotted cream, which depends on very slow heating to thicken the top cream layer of unhomogenized milk into a dense, nutty-tasting crust, has long
been known to people who travel in the West Country of England, and is now taking up permanent residence in this country thanks to
Turkish immigrants devoted to their own riper-flavored counterpart,
kaymak.
People from the Asian and
Latin American tropics are bringing preferences of their own that usually include a love of sweetened, concentrated dairy products such as
canned
condensed
milk or the still intenser
dulce de leche—
also condensed, but by heating in an open kettle rather than under a vacuum. Latin Americans are also crazy about their own versions of
milkshakes (
batidos
) based on many different kinds of tropical fruits.
In short, today’s uses of fresh milk and cream in starring roles add up to more of an expanding galaxy than anyone could have predicted a few years ago. There also seems to be more hope of persuading a few independent-minded farmers and dairyists to improve the quality of what we have to work with.
BUYING MILK AND CREAM
The usual commercial choices in this department unfortunately have more to do with arbitrary niche marketing than simple, unvarnished milk or cream. Nonetheless, some of the questions I’m most frequently asked are about the meanings of different designations on labels of fresh milk and cream. Clearly there is a hunger for more information. Here, in ascending order of richness, are the kinds usually available in retail markets. A preliminary caveat: Very few fresh dairy products have been assigned any formal
FDA “standard of identity” in the Code of Federal Regulations; it may be frustrating to learn that things bearing the same name often vary in composition from one state (or indeed one manufacturer) to another, but such is unfortunately the case.
• Fat-free or nonfat milk: Still informally called “
skim milk” by some, though the term has disappeared from most labels. It contains the whey and casein of milk with none of the butterfat, and is fortified with vitamins A and D. Proportionally it contains more
lactose than any other form of fresh milk. (The proportion of lactose decreases with every increase in milkfat content, so that heavy cream contains only minute amounts.) It also curdles more easily with the heat of cooking. When it comes from well-managed herds of cows producing a lot of protein in the milk, it can be quite satisfying. The fat-free milk from large commercial dairies, however, is at best indifferent-tasting. There are versions with added nonfat dry milk solids, which in my opinion just plaster an extraneous cheesiness over dull-tasting milk. Note that they have more lactose than plain skim milk.
All other gradations manufactured by large commercial processors are
based on fat-free milk homogenized with certain standardized percentages of milkfat.
•
Low-fat milk: Made by homogenizing fat-free milk and cream to 0.5 percent milkfat content. Fortified with
vitamins A and D.
•
Reduced-fat milk: Usually made by homogenizing fat-free milk and cream to 1 percent, 1.5 percent, or 2 percent milkfat content. Fortified with vitamins A and D.
•
Whole milk: The designation “whole,” though legally sanctioned, is misleading inasmuch as the milk has been separated by
centrifuge and recombined to an arbitrary standard. In most states, it means a mixture of nonfat milk and cream homogenized to 3.25 percent milkfat content. Fortified with vitamin D.
Cream, as processed for mass distribution, is also usually homogenized, but not as universally as milk. The unhomogenized kind, in all gradations, is much creamier-tasting. On standing for a while, it will develop a layer of skim milk at the bottom, clearly visible when the cream is sold in glass. This is not a defect but a sign that the cream retains milkfat globules large enough to separate from the thinner milk, not having been crushed to a fraction of their original size through
homogenization.
For more about cream, see the essay on
whipped cream
. Today’s usual retail-store choices—nearly always ultrapasteurized—are:
•
Half-and-half: A term with no uniform meaning. Long ago it hazily designated a mixture of half milk, half cream by volume. Modern manufacturing percentages (by weight) range from 10.5 to 18 percent milkfat in different states, or even in the same state as processed by different manufacturers. Note that percentages are only sometimes stated on
labels. Nearly all half-and-half is homogenized. I hope it isn’t necessary to say that the product brazenly labeled “nonfat half-and-half” in supermarkets is utterly unrelated to the real stuff and should not be used in any of my recipes.
•
Light cream: The least precise of all designations; ranges from 18 to 30 percent milkfat. Thus the terms “half-and-half” and “light cream” can overlap in meaning. If milkfat percentages don’t appear on labels, trial and error is the only way to tell how rich or light local brands of half-and-half or light cream are. Often homogenized.
•
Heavy cream: Must contain at least 36 percent milkfat; anything richer is very rare. Often homogenized.
In most places today it is uncommon to find the intermediate gradation “light whipping cream” for cream with a milkfat percentage between 30 and 36. Where it exists, it is often homogenized.
As explained on
this page
, milk in many gradations is also sold with value-added features such as lactose reduction. In consequence,
dairy-section shelves are filled with a huge number of products that, if you believe the marketing moguls, represent a wonderful diversity of choice inviting cooks to exploit innumerable subtle differences in the kitchen. In my opinion, they add up to the kind of
niche-marketing-gone-hogwild spectacle that you see in the toothpaste aisle. I don’t suggest buying any kinds from supermarkets except
whole milk and
heavy cream (sometimes
light cream or
half-and-half). When unhomogenized, truly whole milk, good
skim milk, and nonultrapasteurized cream are available to cooks everywhere without search missions to expensive specialty food shops, then we can start congratulating ourselves on
choice.
Meanwhile, cooking with milk and cream is best done with the plainest, least-fiddled-with versions you can find.