Authors: Nina Planck
In the New World, too, milk was a staple, from the earliest colonial days right through the middle of the twentieth century,
when farmers like my great-aunt Esther still kept a cow in Milford, Illinois. Esther and Uncle Charlie mostly raised crops,
but they most likely made a little extra money selling milk and cream. Initially, colonial Americans preferred goats, probably
because they were rugged and good at clearing land, and by 1639 there were four thousand goats in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
But the cow— a superior milker— gradually replaced goats. Oxen also pulled the plow and provided beef and leather.
Though grazing was allowed on public sites like Boston Common, the European model of using common land for grazing wasn't
widespread. The self-sufficient homestead was the original American dream and became the typical farming pattern. In 1626,
each family in the Plymouth Colony was allotted one cow and two goats for every six shares of land they held. "This ideal
characterized small farming in America for another two centuries," write Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols in
The Complete Dairy Foods
Cookbook.
JERSEY, QUEEN OF COWS
I'm charmed by the colorful names of breeds, suggesting their hometown (Kerry) or looks (Dutch Belted) or qualities (Milking
Devon). Others known for milk, meat, or both include the Hereford, Simmental, Limousin, Angus, Brown Swiss, Ayrshire, Milking
Shorthorn, Norwegian Red, and Holstein-Friesian. The star of the industrial dairy is the Holstein, a Dutch cow known for copious
production of low-fat, watery milk. For small dairies, the undisputed champion is the Jersey, a small cow native to the Channel
Islands. Docile, an efficient grazer even on poor pasture, intelligent, and productive, she is also the ideal family cow.
But the Jersey's crowning glory is her milk: it contains the highest level of protein, minerals, vitamins, and butterfat of
any breed. Jersey milk is 5 to 6 percent butterfat, nearly twice as rich as Holstein milk, with 3 to 3.5 percent fat— the
norm for whole milk. Jersey milk (and that of her cousin, the Guernsey) is too rich for some to drink straight. No matter;
there will be plenty of fat for cream, butter, and cheese.
Today the family cow is rare, but her role is the same. "The cow is the most productive, efficient creature on earth," writes
Joann Grohman in
Keeping a Family Cow.
"She will give you fresh milk, cream, butter, and cheese, building health, or even making you money. Each year she will give
you a calf to sell or raise for beef." The cow also provides manure for the garden, sour milk for the chickens, and skim milk
or whey for the pig— milk-fed pork being a delicacy. "I serve exceptionally fine food"— I can confirm this, having eaten at
Joann's house—" and I am not stingy with the butter and cream," says Grohman. "The cow is a generous animal."
Keeping a Family Cow
inspired Laura Grout, a mother of five, to change her life. "I was living in a trailer park with a postage stamp for land
and researching nutrition. After learning that unpasteurized milk is better for your health, I went looking for a legal way
to obtain raw milk. This book alone convinced me to leave the city and have a cow." Laura began to raise her own beef, milk,
poultry, and eggs in Sand Hollow, Idaho. "Good nutrition is something every mother should strive to give her children," she
says, "no matter how rich or poor."
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That was my mother's philosophy in a nutshell. She used to say, "No matter how little money we spend on food, we will always
have maple syrup, olive oil, and butter." Now that I live in the city and pay good money for real milk and cream, the significance
of a cow is tangible: Mabel made us richer. I loved a bowl of milk and mashed-up peaches; we put milk on hot oatmeal, and
dessert was often vanilla pudding or custard. After school, Charles and I made smoothies with raw milk, eggs, coffee, and
honey. With Mabel, milk was free and life was good.
OVER THOUSANDS OF YEARS, humans have herded, corralled, and milked a variety of mammals. In the Near East, our ancestors domesticated
sheep and goats about eleven thousand years ago; archaeologists surmise that milk, not meat, was the initial reason for keeping
animals. The first shepherds tended sheep and goats, small and easy to handle. They are also rugged: they thrive on poor farmland
and don't mind harsh climates. Sheep tolerate cold, wind, and snow, while goats scamper up the steepest mountain and live
off brambles or any weed that happens to grow in hedgerows. On the rocky slopes of Greece and the hills of hot, dry Provence,
sheep milk cheese (salty, crumbly feta) and goat milk cheese (creamy chevre) have been made since ancient times.
About eighty-five hundred years ago, somewhere in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), we began to milk the larger and more productive
cow. Cows are more delicate than sheep and goats— in bad weather they prefer the barn, and for grazing they favor lush rolling
pasture— yet of all the mammals humans have tried, including asses, buffalo, camels, llamas, mares, reindeer, and yaks, the
cow is the champion milker.
That's the conventional chronology of milking, at any rate, but several clues suggest we were drinking milk for much longer
than ten thousand years. One clue lies in the popular understanding, or misunderstanding, of early agricultural history. Most
people believe that "farming" (meaning both plant and animal husbandry) began about ten thousand years ago in the Fertile
Crescent. It is more likely, however, that we herded animals long before we grew corn, wheat, and beans. There is no
agricultural
reason to link milking with growing grains. The natural diet of ruminants is grass. Early shepherds didn't need to grow grain:
they needed only meadows and some skill in handling animals.
Fences imply that we were shepherds before we were farmers. "Thirty thousand years ago, people in the High Sinai were confining
and breeding antelope with the aid of fences, a human invention arguably as important as the spear," writes Grohman in
Keeping a Family Cow.
Fences were the best means of keeping the best milkers close at hand and choosing the most docile and productive cows to mate.
The friendly, efficient dairy cow has been the focus of so much intensive breeding over thousands of years that today she
has no wild cousins left, and lives only at our whim.
All meat and dairy cattle are descendants of the original wild ox, a six-thousand-pound giant called an aurochs, described
by Julius Caesar as only slightly smaller than an elephant. "The aurochs became extinct in the seventeenth century, the last
one dying alone in a private park in Poland," writes Gina Mallet in
Last Chance to Eat.
"But it can be seen depicted in cave paintings: a large, bony animal with sharp horns impaling stick humans." How the fierce
aurochs— a symbol of strength in Viking runes— was eventually domesticated is a mystery. In
A Cow's Life,
M. R. Montgomery suggests that Neolithic man tamed an aurochs midget first.
In time we were master of bull and cow alike. Fish and game made up most of the typical Paleolithic diet, but this new food,
milk, had its advantages and before long it was popular. As a source of daily protein, milking wild ruminants was more reliable
than hunting, which was hit-or-miss. Hunting also presented a practical problem. Because it was impossible to keep meat fresh
without refrigeration, fresh kill had to be eaten quickly. The immediate family of the successful hunter couldn't eat a wooly
mammoth in one sitting, so the bounty was shared with the tribe or village. Thus sharing meat with other men— or trading meat
(dinner) for sex with a woman— is one of the oldest human activities. Even now, serving a roast is a symbol of hospitality.
Milking, by contrast, did not present the feast-or-famine dilemma; it was a steady business.
Technology plays a big role in the history of milk; every advance in fencing, breeding, and preserving milk made milking more
efficient. The result is that consumption of dairy foods is nearly universal in human groups. With the notable exception of
East and Southeast Asia, all the European and Middle Eastern cultures, and many Asian and African ones, have a shepherding
tradition.
Yogurt, the simplest form of preserved milk, is probably as old as milking itself. Milk "invites its own preservation," writes
food maven Harold McGee. Fresh milk curdles quickly, especially in hot weather. Yogurt would have been made— or rather, made
itself— simply for lack of refrigeration. The precise origins of yogurt are not known but easy to imagine. When fresh milk
is left to stand at room temperature, local bacteria begin to consume the sugars. The milk thickens and becomes tangy with
lactic acid. Depending on the bacteria, the result is yogurt, sour cream, or some other cultured milk that stays fresh longer
than "sweet" or fresh milk.
Another simple method of preserving nutrients in milk is to remove water. In Iran, milk was reduced to its essence, making
a sort of milk bouillon cube to be reconstituted with water. In the thirteenth century, the nomadic Tatar armies of Genghis
Khan carried a packed lunch of powdered mare's milk. After skimming off the cream for butter, they dried the skim milk in
the sun. Kept in a leather pouch, powdered milk made a convenient meal on the road. It wasn't perishable, and when mixed with
water and jostled about on horseback, it made a fermented drink something like yogurt.
Turning milk into cheese is the most sophisticated method of preservation. Gouda, Parmigiano Reggiano, and other traditional
aged cheeses mature for two years or longer. Most agree that cheese making is about five thousand years old, but as with yogurt,
no one knows exactly where cheese was born, and it's quite possible that shepherds living far apart invented cheese simultaneously.
Some of those pioneers were in the French Pyrenees, and in Sumeria, Egypt, five-thousand-year-old pottery bears cheesy residues.
Though cheese takes many forms, the basic method—-adding rennet to curdle milk— is unchanged, and even particular recipes
survive a long time. The recipe for Gaperon, a soft French cheese made with garlic and peppercorns, is twelve hundred years
old.
The effects of milk on human diet and culture were widespread and profound. In
About Cows,
Sara Rath says that six-thousand-year-old Sanskrit writings refer to milk as an essential food. The Hindus, who ate and celebrated
butter four thousand years ago, honor cows, as did the Sumerians and Babylonians. The Romans, too, were milk drinkers and
cheese lovers, and spread the habit throughout Europe. Cattle— in Latin
pecus,
from
pascendum
(put to pasture)— were even used to conduct trades; hence the Roman word for money,
pecunia.
Caesar was evidently irritated to find that Britons in his far-flung empire neglected to grow crops, preferring to live on
meat and milk instead.
The Bible makes dozens of references to milk, which represents privilege, wealth, and spiritual blessings, as in "land flowing
with milk and honey." Shakespeare's plays are replete with flattering comparisons to milk, butter, and cream, and modern idioms
glorify milk. To flatter someone, you
butter him up-,
the very best is
la
creme de la creme.
Whether from the human breast or the bovine udder, milk is the universal perfect food— delicious, soothing, nourishing. Milk
is delicate, sensuous, transient. It is both simple— a nutritionally complete meal in a glass— and marvelously complex, its
various ingredients interacting as if the milk itself were a tiny ecosystem. Indeed, traditional milk is alive, teeming with
enzymes and microorganisms that evolved right along with man and woman, usually in the belly.
Milk is diverse. The milks of the ewe and the cow, the mare and the nak, are each different. Even within one species, milk
is suggestible: the grass, flowers, and herbs the animal eats create further distinctions, affecting aroma, flavor, and nutrition.
The hint of garlic— or more than a hint— in milk is not unknown when animals eat their way through a patch of wild ramps.
Gracious and malleable, milk is capable of being transformed into cloudlike whipped cream, silken butter, wobbly yogurt, tangy
kefir, creamy
fromage frais,
fluffy ricotta, and dense cheddar.
No wonder this noble food has inspired farmers, chefs, poets— and even politicians. William Cobbett was a member of Parliament,
pamphleteer, and reformer who toured the English countryside in the early nineteenth century. A self-appointed defender of
farm life and the working man, Cobbett understood peasant life better than most politicians. "When you have a cow," he wrote,
"you have it all."
WE ARE THE ONLY animal to drink milk after weaning and the only animal to drink the milk of another mammal. Whether that's
good
is a hot topic. Some say milk is a cure-all. In the nineteenth century, doctors credited all-milk diets with all manner of
therapeutic effects, and even today modern practitioners treat maladies from arthritis to eczema with whole raw milk. The
other side says milk is poison.
Robert Cohen is one of milk's fiercest critics. The milk carton on the cover of his book,
Milk: The Deadly Poison,
bears a skull and crossbones, with the ingredients listed in large type: "Powerful growth hormones, cholesterol, fat, allergenic
bovine proteins, insecticides, antibiotics, virus, and bacteria." Cohen says dairy foods are linked to acne, allergies, anemia,
asthma, constipation, obesity, osteoporosis, and breast cancer. "It is probable," writes Cohen, "that milk consumption is
the foundation of heart disease."
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals runs a campaign against milk called
Milk Sucks!
"Dairy products are a health hazard . . . laden with saturated fat and cholesterol. They are contaminated with cow's blood
and pus and frequently . . . with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics."
Press like that could make a vegan out of the most contented milkmaid, and that's exactly what happened to me. I gave up dairy
foods to avoid saturated fat and cholesterol and because they were said to be indigestible and allergenic. It was soy milk
for me. Later, when I was working with small dairies at the farmers' markets in London, I began to wonder about the bad reputation
of milk, cream, butter, and cheese. Our customers were snapping up whole milk and raw milk cheese. As I began to eat real
dairy again, it was easy to see why. Soy milk tastes nothing like the real thing. In cooking, butter is irreplaceable. As
for cheese, I had barely begun to discover the most complex and diverse form of the remarkably pliable milk.