Milk (35 page)

YIELD:
4 to 6 servings

Bring the water or broth to a boil in a saucepan. Reduce the heat to low and add the tarhana in a trickle, whisking to eliminate lumps. Cook, stirring frequently, for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until thickened to the consistency of a light cream soup. In the last few minutes, stir in any of the optional seasonings along with the salt and pepper. Serve at once, piping hot.

YIELD:
4 to 6 servings

Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a saucepan, add the onion, and sauté until translucent. Add the pepper strips and sauté briefly. Crumble the optional ground meat into the pan and cook, stirring to break up lumps, until it loses its red color. Stir in the tomato, let simmer for a minute, and add the broth or water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and add the tarhana in a trickle, whisking to eliminate any lumps. Cook, stirring frequently, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until lightly thickened. Add the mint, any of the optional seasonings, and salt and pepper.

Heat the remaining butter in a small skillet until fragrant, sizzling, and not quite browned. Add the bread cubes or crumbs and let brown lightly, tossing to coat well with butter. Serve the soup at once, piping hot, garnishing each portion with some of the croutons.

Introduction

Some Cultured Milk and Cream Products: A Brief Survey

Homemade Cultured Buttermilk

Homemade Sour Cream

Herring with Sour Cream Sauce

Smoked Whitefish Salad

Buttermilk-Caraway Soup

Michael Field’s “Chlodnik” (Cold Savory Buttermilk Soup)

Chlodnik Litewski (Polish Cold Beet Soup)

Kadhi or Karhi (North Indian Thick Buttermilk Soup)

Moru Kozhambu (South Indian Buttermilk Soup)

Cold Blueberry Soup

Sour Cream/Crème Fraîche as Cold Sauce and Dip

Buttermilk Salad Dressing

Cucumber-Radish Sour Cream Sauce

Mennonite Buttermilk “Salad”

Beef Stroganoff

Chicken Paprikás, or Paprikahuhn

Mushrooms with Sour Cream Sauce

Mushroom Pirozhki with Sour Cream Pastry

Buttermilk Potatoes

Fried Bananas with Crema

Southern Buttermilk Pie

Hangop (Dutch Buttermilk Dessert)

Buttermilk as Drink

Y
ogurt is so hugely important in so many of the world’s cuisines as to cast most other kinds of
cultured
milk into comparative shade. But they exist in diverse forms wherever milk exists, because milk naturally attracts lactic-acid bacteria and sometimes other organisms, including particular
molds and
yeasts. We know very little about their history. Still, the reason for their diversity is obvious: As dairying spread out from its first centers into most of the Old World, local climates favored wild local microorganisms.

As explained earlier, over many centuries all dairying peoples learned to culture milk by exposing it in a fairly controlled way to certain organisms that prospered in their own haunts, usually in the form of a
starter taken from a previous batch. Or to put it another way, they learned to domesticate bits of the local microflora. Probably no one will ever be able to identify the multiple versions of cultured milk made throughout the world. (Modern science is not close to identifying all the microscopic species and subspecies used to produce them.) What they have in common is that, like
yogurt, they are allowed to ferment just until there is enough
casein precipitation to form a partly liquid gel, not the firm curd of cheese. But unlike yogurt, most involve not the
thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria endemic to Yogurtistan but
mesophilic species that need cooler conditions to thrive.

The most
exotic kinds, from an American consumer’s viewpoint, were native to Central Asia and the western fringes of
China, where horse-herding nomads used complexes of bacteria and yeasts to ferment the very lactose-rich mares’ milk into a sour, slightly effervescent
alcoholic drink called “
kumys” (or “kumis,” “koumiss”). Today it is rare and perhaps headed for extinction, at least as made from mares’ milk. A milder-flavored and less-alcoholic cousin, “
kefir,” evolved in the mountainous reaches between Georgia and southern Russia. (Unless sugar was added, it never developed the same kick, because no milch animals except
horses and asses give milk with enough lactose to support much
alcoholic
fermentation.)

Another family of regional cultured-milk specialties little known in this country originated in
Scandinavia or the
Netherlands and is known among dairy chemists by the collective name of “
ropy milks”—“ropy” in the sense that a spoon dipped into the milk will come out trailing long viscous strings that non-Scandinavians find disconcerting. This unique quality comes from
special mutations of several common mesophilic bacteria. Old-timers are said to consider ropy milk more flavorful and sustaining than any other kind of soured milk. The culinary
historians
Yvonne and William Lockwood report that diehards in the Finnish communities of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula still keep alive the Finnish version, “long
viili,
” while the younger generation offers unflattering comparisons to mucus or slime and sticks to “short
viili,
” which is more like our cultured
buttermilk.

These are all too familiar stories of former knowledge going the way of the two-bit subway fare. Such changes are usually more subtle than the loss of mares’-milk kumys or ropy milk. The plainest examples in the United States and most of western Europe are the replacement of home-soured milk and true buttermilk by cultured buttermilk as a universal stand-in, and the parallel case of home-soured cream and cultured
sour cream. Today the cultured versions are all that many people know of fresh fermented milk.

It is easy to suppose that “buttermilk” as we know it connects us with a homespun culinary past. But until about a hundred years ago, recipes mentioning buttermilk—or sour cream—by name appeared less often in cookbooks than today. If you made butter, you regularly had some buttermilk on hand and knew how to use it without recipes. And if you had more fresh milk or cream on hand than you had immediate use for, you were bound to have
sour milk or sour cream as soon as the lactic-acid bacteria in your home started colonizing them.

The results were anything but uniform in quality. Any batch might differ from preceding ones, though experienced cooks could partly control things by keeping track of the ambient temperature (everything soured faster in summer) and using the last of one batch to carefully inoculate the next. Different households or regions as well as different ethnic groups had their preferences about how sour or mild, thick or thin sour milk and cream should be. Clearly, local complexes of lactic-acid bacteria can’t have been identical from one region (or even neighborhood) to another. The bottom line: Sour milk, buttermilk, and sour cream were simply facts of kitchen life, capable of infinite gradations that no one tried to capture in cookbooks.

Hints of change appeared around 1800, but it took more than a century to erase the diversity of American cultured milk. One factor was the introduction of alkaline
leaveners for quick-raised breads and cakes, the predecessors of today’s baking soda. Sour milk at once took on a particular role in a new kitchen department that claimed to be more modern and enlightened than yeast breads or cakes—chemically raised batters for quick breads, biscuits, muffins, or pancakes. Batters using potash, pearlash, or the first versions of “saleratus” depended on a reaction that instantly generated carbon-dioxide bubbles in the mixture before it went into the oven or onto the griddle. This
chemical change depended on the addition of something acid. Cream of tartar was the recommendation of the scientifically minded, but sour milk was cheap and universally available. It thus began acquiring a greater prominence in written recipes.

But sour milk’s days in the kitchen were numbered. The triumph of fresh, unsoured “sweet” milk was dawning. When
pasteurized milk began to drive out
raw milk, cooks reaching for sour milk increasingly found that they had none on hand. The usual improvised substitute was sweet milk rapidly curdled with a little lemon juice or vinegar. It was at this point, by about the late 1920s, that American dairy producers started selling the product known as “
cultured
buttermilk”—a slightly thickened soured milk based on commercial mixtures of mesophilic bacteria. Of course it was not real buttermilk, which was the residue left from churning butter and varied in flavor along with the character of the butter itself (
this page
). But by the time of World War II, few consumers knew enough to quibble over the difference. Recipes calling for buttermilk became more numerous in cookbooks, and cooks came to assume that they represented a taste of the colonial or early American past.

The good news in this tale of shrinking horizons is that at least we still have access to a useful and sometimes quite flavorful product: plain cultured buttermilk. The less happy aspects are that neither consumers nor producers really think of cultured buttermilk as a delicacy and a privilege, and that no enterprising manufacturer has tried offering, say, half a dozen subtly varied versions of bacterially soured milk (as opposed to additive-laced travesties aimed at dieters) to knowledgeable buyers. All that is needed are excellent fresh milk (perhaps unhomogenized) and different combinations of bacteria to bring out different flavor nuances. I will wager that if even a few more differentiated kinds of honest sour milk were available, the public would respond. The story is much the same with
sour cream, though I think sour milk or “buttermilk” either whole, low-fat, or nonfat has richer, more varied possibilities.

Even now, the best cultured buttermilk is a great
culinary resource. Its uses are somewhat interchangeable with those of plain yogurt, but it harmonizes more discreetly with some flavors because of the different character imparted by the mesophilic bacteria. It’s still a useful leavener, in tandem with baking soda, for many kinds of biscuits, muffins, griddle cakes, and quick breads. As a
marinade naturally helped out by lactic acid, it’s even better than sweet milk at taming fishy-flavored fish, and also is popular for tenderizing chicken. A very vocal Southern fried-chicken school insists on soaking the pieces in buttermilk for several hours or even overnight before cooking.

To me, cultured buttermilk is most irresistible as a cold
drink—with or without other flavorings; see
this page
for suggestions—or soup. As “sour milk,” it was the foundation of various
Kaltschalen,
a tribe of slightly sweetened
North
German cold soups that were much loved a few generations ago. Farther to the east, sour milk was the chief underpinning of distinctively sour-flavored cold soups as richly varied as Spanish gazpachos. Today
cultured buttermilk is our chief tool for reproducing, or at least approximating, these disappearing legacies.

Cultured sour cream is nearly as versatile an ingredient. Its American success, however, came a little later. Before pasteurization, cream left at room temperature gradually acquired a lactic-acid tang, though it stayed less sharp than sour milk because the colonizing bacteria didn’t have as much lactose to work on. Before
homogenization, it also set up quite thick in a couple of days. Though cooks have always used sour cream, it wasn’t especially visible in American cookbooks until fairly recently. Ashkenazic Jews from the Pale of Settlement were the first group to use it extensively as a delicacy in its own right.