Milk (2 page)

Few readers of this book will need to be convinced that whether or not aged and ripened cheeses belong to the very oldest and most widespread milky
ways, they are a glorious contribution to the joy of mankind. I have not tried to discuss them for the simple reason that there are already many other works treating the subject with the love and intelligence that it deserves—though sometimes also leaving the mistaken impression that fresh dairy products are really cheese manqué.

The situation is very different with fresh
milk and such offshoots as fresh
cream or sweet
butter. They can indeed taste wonderful—I hope to convey an idea of just how wonderful—when carefully and skillfully brought to us in a state of true freshness. They can be invaluable in a savvy cook’s arsenal of resources. But you will note that I’ve written “can be,” not “are.” The triumph of drinkable fresh (or pseudo-fresh) milk as the dominant popular Western form of milk started us off down the garden path to the unfortunate consequences that I mentioned before. It has left millions of us without access to genuinely fresh, excellent milk—or any sense of what we’re missing.

This long deprivation is why the revival of
small dairy farms and the reawakening of interest in artisanal fresh dairy products is such cause for rejoicing. It would have been a splendid turn of events at any stage in the last fifty years. Great things are happening when more and more of us have access to butter that tastes like cream,
cream
that tastes like cream, and—still more important—flavorful unhomogenized milk pasteurized by methods less “efficient” than those now standard in the industry. But by happy coincidence, or maybe not mere coincidence, these developments have arrived at the same moment as have waves of immigrants from parts of the globe where older, non-Western traditions of consuming and cooking with milk still prevail. Some of today’s small farmers are developing an interest in ancient (and excellent) sources of milk that once would have seemed ludicrously far-fetched—goats galore, dairy sheep, and even water buffaloes. Anyone can see that very new Americans from very ancient milking regions will shortly be looking around for what they consider good milk, together with good yogurt or other soured milk, fresh cheeses, and perhaps even their own preferred versions of butter. I believe that with these on hand, America’s culinary horizons will be rapidly and spectacularly enlarged.

As you will see, the book straddles several categories. From a pretty early stage I knew that it would have to be part narrative history, reaching back into the prehistoric past to make clear what extraordinary creatures the milch animals are and including an unflinching look at the course of modern factory-scale dairy farming and processing. People today, after all, are starting to believe that they should know where their food comes from. I was convinced that even a brief account of our Goliath milk industry would make people stand up and cheer for the hundreds of little Davids who are now appearing on the American dairying scene. I saw also that the book would have to make at
least a quick foray into the chemical intricacies that are the reason milk isn’t reproducible by phony substitutes. And I knew both that I wanted to present an eclectic array of recipes from dramatically differing world traditions and that what I wanted to show about the incredible versatility of milk in cooking was not going to fit any usual organization of recipes by menu category.

When all the pieces came together, they formed two pictures, both taken from many angles. One is a broad overall look at where milk comes from and what it is, the other a worldwide exploration of milk in cookbook form.

The first section opens with a historical survey of milch animals and milking traditions in the four great geographical zones where milk became a defining culinary element. It goes on to trace the strange fortunes of fresh (well, not very fresh) drinkable milk in modern Western societies, leading up to an age of intensively bred-and-fed supercows, increasingly bizarre forms of processing, and nutrition wars. And before turning to actual recipes, I sketch the biological and chemical underpinnings without which we would have neither milk nor any of the things made from it.

The cookbook portion begins with the uses of fresh unfermented milk and cream (as well as modern canned milk) and goes on to explore yogurt in many guises, other forms of cultured milk and cream, butter (with the true buttermilk that is part of the buttermaking process), and fresh cheeses. The recipes have been chosen to suggest what a wealth of experiences awaits any adventurous dairy-minded cook with the enterprise to plumb both Western European traditions based on fresh milk, cream, and butter and the still more exciting ones now reaching us from entirely different cuisines.

At bottom,
Milk
springs from both a long-standing concern about our troubled milk supply and a growing belief that we’re on the road to an era of more delicious milk and simple dairy foods, including whole complexes of cooking possibilities that many of us never dreamed of a generation ago. I hope that I have done justice to the beauties of fresh milk and cream, the less familiar miracles of their freshly fermented counterparts (with yogurt occupying a position of special honor), and the pleasures of fresh as well as brined cheeses. My love affair with the subject has been a voyage of many discoveries. I will be happy if I can bring other people along on it.

M
any thousands of years ago, somebody saw an animal nursing her young and had the eccentric, not to say dangerous, idea of getting in on the act.

This “somebody” was most likely many
Neolithic somebodies, independently impelled to the same experiment. Students of
prehistory have never pinpointed an exact time or place for one definitively successful attempt at
milking. But they have educated guesses about when and where people got the art down pat: probably some time between 8000 and 6000
B.C.
, somewhere between the Anatolian plateau and the Zagros Mountains of southwestern Iran. They also know one thing about the animal in question: It wasn’t a cow.

A strange custom, this, using another creature’s milk for food. Even today it is anything but universal among the world’s peoples. But where it took hold, other animals’ milk became a staff of life and—odd though it may seem to those reared on cows’ milk from cartons—a source of varied, rich, exuberant, and even exciting flavors in many cooking traditions from prehistory to the present.

The oldest places where humans mastered the skills of milking tend to overlap with the region, where the world’s oldest documented cuisines originated and where some ancestral preferences still survive. Today, when mechanized or even computerized milking is a gigantic commercial enterprise in advanced societies from Australia to Argentina, food lovers everywhere can still learn much from the relationships among humans, animals, and foodways that sprang up in those primal areas, as well as patterns that followed over a few thousand years in several other parts of the premodern world (the premodern
Old
World, since milking was unknown in North and South
America until after Columbus).

Virtually all the most ingenious, flexible uses of milk as a food and cooking ingredient can be traced to four seminal culinary zones of ancient Asia and Europe, each marked by characteristic preferences for certain milch animals as well as particular dairy foods. Starting with the oldest, they can be conveniently thought of as the
Diverse Sources Belt, the
Bovine and Buffalo Belt,
the
Northeastern Cow Belt, and the
Northwestern Cow Belt. The four primary zones correspond respectively with the great east-west sweep from the
Balkans to western Mongolia, the
Indian subcontinent, northeastern Europe from the Baltic into Russia, and northwestern Europe.

You will notice one great omission fitting into none of these categories: the milking regions and traditions of
Africa. My reason for leaving them out is that many crucial practices simply are not reproducible in American kitchens. Even today the uses of milk in the chief dairying areas (the east, southward from parts of
Ethiopia and the Sudan to Mozambique) are stamped by ancient pastoral,
semi-nomadic ways of life and particular techniques—for example, impregnating the interior surface of milk-collecting gourds with smoke from fragrant grasses or wood chips—that probably are impossible to translate into meaningful terms for cooks in industrialized societies. At least, I’ve found no sources of culinary information, though in the United States we’re starting to get some picture of Ethiopian foodways, including a few milk-based specialties.

At the outset, today’s cooks should know that much of what’s worth discovering about milk as a culinary treasure first emerged throughout a certain broad swath of Eurasia centuries (at least) before milking spread to regions north and south, and millennia before more specialized approaches carried the day in industrialized Europe. The beginnings were almost surely in the
prehistoric Near East, several hundred miles from the coastal Mediterranean sites where grain crops were first domesticated: present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, starting at some point before about 8000
B.C.
Somewhat eastward and many centuries later, other nameless pioneers applied the idea of
domestication to the animal kingdom. They began with a few local creatures—possibly objects of sacrificial cults—that hunters had already found to be promising sources of meat and hides. In time they, and neighbors in gradually widening areas over a general eastward-westward course, extended the new practice to more species, until people throughout a several-thousand-mile range from the Balkans, Mediterranean North Africa, and the northwestern fringes of Arabia far into central Asia were
herding and tending more than half a dozen kinds of four-footed livestock. Unlike people in the other principal zones, they have continued to use several if not most of these creatures as milk sources to this day.

The practice of milking didn’t develop as early as other uses of domestic animals. It must be seen in contexts quite unrelated to modern milking—for example, climate and geography, which nowadays hardly impinge at all on the lives of the largest dairy-cow herds.

The cradle of animal domestication, from Asia Minor eastward into present-day Iraq and Iran, was not gentle. Most of the region was arid and had brutally hot summers, a fact that would intensely stamp the oldest chapters of dairying history. The geographic range of livestock herding gradually expanded eastward and westward in ancient times to embrace a greater range of terrains both more and less hospitable, but largely sharing some harsh features of the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia.

Throughout the great east-west belt where milking first took root, the chief livestock animals were
goats,
sheep,
pigs, cattle,
horses,
asses, and
camels. Pigs were the odd ones out here. All the rest had at least dual careers as sources of meat and milk, with some also doing duty as beasts of burden.

What made them suitable for the milking part of the arrangement? Or to put the question differently, why were pigs
not
used for milking? One obvious reason is that pigs—as equal-opportunity scavengers of vegetable and animal matter—are the only nonherbivores in the lineup. No society has ever habitually consumed milk from any animal that doesn’t live on grass and leaves. The preferred species have always been ruminants (sheep, goats, cattle, the
reindeer of far northern Europe, the
water buffaloes of India), other cud-chewing animals (dromedaries, Bactrian camels), and a few non-cud-chewers fairly good at converting vegetation into milk and meat (horses, asses).

It may be—I’ve never talked to anyone in a position to know—that flesh eaters and omnivores communicate some flavor to their milk that made prehistoric peoples reject it. But regardless of this point, anatomy alone would have put them at a disadvantage for being milked. The club of domestic milch animals consists of fairly, though not unmanageably, large hoofed beasts standing high enough off the ground for human hands to reach under them without great difficulty. Carnivores like dogs and omnivores like pigs give birth to large litters, which means that the mammary system is spread out along the whole length of the mother’s belly. She nurses lying on her side, while with long-legged hoofed mammals both mother and offspring stand during nursing. The large grass eaters all bear single young, or at most twins or triplets. This makes it possible for the
mammary gland to assume the compact (and from the human viewpoint, convenient) form of an udder beneath the animal’s hindquarters. As a final advantage, all have nipples elongated into teats that hands can easily grasp.

All the major Eurasian milch animals also live and move in herds, ranging over sizable territories in search of food. They are well adapted to open grasslands of different kinds, from dry steppes to steep hillside pasturage to well-watered plains. (Pigs would starve on any such ground.) The sparser the vegetation, the more widely they need to wander. Thus they have always been a more natural fit with some form of pastoral
nomadism than with settled
farming on limited tracts of land. (The latter won out in most of the world, but without large-scale technology and transportation it is a difficult balancing act.) The tremendous east-west sweep of the globe running from Hungary and the Balkans across the Hellespont through Asia Minor, south of the Black and Caspian Seas and north of the Himalayas, on into Mongolia and western China is remarkably rich in grasslands that must have been the
original habitats for the wild ancestors of today’s milch animals. Even today, a few groups of pastoral nomads still tend roving herds of
goats,
sheep, cattle, camels, and to an extent
horses in parts of central and western Asia. Milk has always been a prominent part of the bargain because lactating females can in essence carry part of a tribe’s daily food supply on the hoof, relieving people of the need to haul it around.