Milk Read online

  To my dear friend Charlotte Sheedy,

  one of the finest people I have ever known

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  NONFICTION

  Havana: A Subtropical Delirium

  Paper: Paging through History

  International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way around the World

  Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America

  Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

  Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One

  What? Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History—or Is This a Game of 20 Questions?

  The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris

  The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food from the Lost WPA Files

  The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

  The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

  Nonviolence: A History of a Dangerous Idea

  1968: The Year that Rocked the World

  Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History

  Salt: A World History

  The Basque History of the World

  Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

  A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

  A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

  FICTION

  City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife

  Edible Stories: A Novel in Sixteen Parts

  “The Belly of Paris” by Émile Zola: A New Translation with an Introduction by Mark Kurlansky

  Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music

  The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories

  CHILDREN/YOUNG ADULT

  Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseye’s Outrageous Idea about Frozen Food

  Battle Fatigue

  World without Fish

  The Story of Salt

  The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi

  The Cod’s Tale

  CONTENTS

  A Note about the Recipes

  PART ONE   THE SAFETY OF CURDS

    1    THE FIRST TASTE OF SWEETNESS

    2    GOING SOUR IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT

    3    CHEESY CIVILIZATION

    4    BUTTERY BARBARIANS

    5    DESERT MILK

    6    THE DAYS OF MILK AND BEER

    7    THE CHEESE HEADS

    8    TO MAKE PUDDING

    9    EVERYONE’S FAVORITE MILK

  PART TWO   DRINKING DANGEROUSLY

  10    DYING FOR SOME MILK

  11    THE FIRST SAFE MILK

  12    A NEW AND ENDLESS FIGHT

  13    INDUSTRIAL COWS

  14    MODERN CUISINES

  PART THREE   COWS AND TRUTH

  15    THE BUTTERING OF TIBET

  16    CHINA’S GROWING TOLERANCE

  17    TROUBLE IN COW PARADISE

  18    RAW CRAFTSMANSHIP

  19    THE SEARCH FOR CONSENSUS

  20    RISKY INITIALIZATIONS

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Recipe Index

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  How sad that we have no memories of our mother’s milk or our first sight of the world, through eyes made blurry by the tears we shed for milk …

  —SAIT FAIK ABASIYANIK, “Milk”

  A NOTE ABOUT THE RECIPES

  Si vous n’êtes pas capable d’un peu d’alchémie, ce n’est pas la peine de vous mettre en cuisine.

  If you are not capable of a bit of alchemy, don’t bother going into the kitchen.

  —COLETTE

  I often include recipes in my books, not because of some suppressed desire to write cookbooks, but because I believe recipes to be invaluable artifacts. They teach us about societies and the social order in which they were created. They tell us what life was like at the time when those dishes were first cooked. I usually have not concerned myself with whether the recipe will result in a pleasing dish.

  However, in researching this book, I came across so many dairy dishes to choose from that I decided to select ones that would be enjoyable to eat. And so I encourage the reader to try some of these recipes. That said, I would avoid Richard Nixon’s cottage cheese recipe, “milk water,” or some of the baby formulas. Milk toast never appealed to me, either. But cream pancakes and junket, syllabub and posset are voices from the past worth trying. Indian pudding, ginger ice cream, a hot strawberry sundae, Jamaican banana ice cream, or especially Pellegrino Artusi’s caffé latte gelato could make your day. Do try Louis Diat’s glorious original recipe for vichyssoise. And there are many others, such as the Indian recipes from what is possibly the greatest dairy cuisine.

  I always included the original recipes without updating them, though I have slipped in a few explanations [between brackets], as some of the recipes, particularly the older ones, are a bit vague and hard to follow. One of those is the recipe for Cato’s cheesecake, which many have tried to clarify, but no one seems to know exactly how it is supposed to turn out. That means that your version is as valid as the next. Feel free to make adjustments, create, and use modern tools such as a stove and an ice cream maker. The best dishes are often those to which the chef adds a personal statement, even when using a very old recipe. As Colette said, use a little alchemy.

  —PART ONE—

  THE SAFETY OF CURDS

  He curdled half the milk and set it aside in wicker strainers, but the other half he poured into bowls that he might drink it for his supper.

  —ODYSSEUS, observing the Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey

  1

  THE FIRST TASTE OF SWEETNESS

  Since milk is a food and this book contains 126 recipes, it might seem as if this should be a food book. But milk is a food with a history—it has been argued about for at least the past ten thousand years. It is the most argued-over food in human history, which is why it was the first food to find its way into a modern scientific laboratory and why it is the most regulated of all foods.

  People have argued over the importance of breastfeeding, the proper role of mothers, the healthful versus unhealthful qualities of milk, the best sources of milk, farming practices, animal rights, raw versus pasteurized milk, the safety of raw milk cheese, the proper role of government, the organic food movement, hormones, genetically modified crops, and more.

  Here is a food fight that gourmets, chefs, agronomists, parents, feminists, chemists, epidemiologists, nutritionists, biologists, economists, and animal lovers can all weigh in on.

  One great misconception about milk is that people who cannot drink it have something wrong with them. In truth, the aberrant condition is being able to drink milk. Milk drinkers are mostly of European extraction, and as we are living in a Eurocentric world, we tend to think of consuming dairy products as a normal thing to do—something that is forgone in some regions only because of a malady known as lactose intolerance. But lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. In nature, the babies of most mammals nurse only until they are ready for food, and then a gene steps in to shut down the ability to digest milk. Lactose, a sugar in milk, is digestible only when lactase, a genetically controlled enzyme, is present in the intestines. Almost everyone is born with lactase. Without it, a baby could not breastfeed. But as mo
st babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk.

  But something went wrong with Europeans—as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.

  The gene travels in blood-related tribes and family groups. So though most black Africans are lactose-intolerant, the Masai, who are cattle herders, are not. Those who are intolerant tend not to have dairy in their culture. But in societies that do adopt a dairy culture, such as the Masai or Indians in Asia, the ability to digest milk remains. The early Europeans had dairy cultures and so were lactose-tolerant, though this was truer in the north, where short growing seasons necessitated a supplemental food source. However, being lactose-tolerant certainly is not entirely a question of climate, because the original Americans—occupying two continents stretching from Patagonia to Alaska and including just about every imaginable climate—were lactose-intolerant.

  Though most Europeans drink milk today, we don’t really know the original extent of lactose intolerance on the Continent, because centuries ago, milk drinking there was rare. Hard cheese and yogurt were popular, but they do not contain lactose, and this might have been a reason why the Europeans favored them. Somewhere between then and now, though, Europeans began to drink milk, and because they always had a way of defining their aberrations as the norm, they took their dairy animals with them wherever they went around the globe.

  To think of milk as just another food would be to ignore the galaxy we live in. Not just figuratively, but also literally. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, and both it and the word “galaxy” have their origins in the Greek word for milk, gala. According to Greek mythology, the Milky Way was formed when Hera, the Greek goddess of womanhood, spilled milk while breastfeeding Heracles, known to the Romans as Hercules. Each drop became a speck of light, known to us as a star. And Hera must have spilled a lot of milk, because modern astronomers estimate that there are 400 billion stars in the galaxy.

  Numerous cultures have such milk-based creation myths. The Fulani people of West Africa believe that the world started with a huge drop of milk from which everything else was created. According to Norse legend, in the beginning there was a giant frost ogre named Ymir, who was sustained by a cow made from thawing frost. From her four teats ran four rivers of milk that fed the emerging world.

  In what is today Iraq, the Sumerian culture, the first civilization to develop a written language, was among the first to milk domesticated animals. According to one of their legends, a priest named Shamash in the city of Urak spoke to animals and persuaded them to withhold their milk from the goddess Nidaba. But two shepherd brothers, discovering the plot, threw Shamash into the Euphrates, where he transformed himself into a sheep. The brothers discovered his ruse and threw him into the Euphrates again. This time, he turned himself into a cow. Discovered a third time, he assumed the form of a chamois, a kind of antelope. This appears to be a legend about a search for a reliable milking animal.

  Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, giver of life, was often shown breastfeeding a pharaoh, while Osiris, her husband, was celebrated for pouring out bowls of milk, one for each day of the year. Isis was a popular deity throughout the Middle East, and was depicted with large breasts and a cow’s head and horns. Images of her Greek counterpart, Artemis, sometimes had several dozen breasts. The Egyptians also worshiped another deity, Hathor, as the cow goddess. Milk was a common offering in Egyptian temples.

  It was believed that a baby acquired the personality of his or her wet nurse, so these caregivers needed to be carefully selected. It was said that Zeus was so unfaithful to women because he had been suckled by a goat, an animal infamous for debauchery, on the island of Crete. Infants who were suckled by the same wet nurse were regarded as milk siblings and were forbidden by the Assyrians from intermarrying.

  In the third or second century B.C.E., a letter written to a new Roman mother stated: “The wet nurse should not be temperamental or talkative nor uncontrolled in her appetite for food, but orderly and temperate, practical, not a foreigner, but a Greek.” This last requirement came up frequently in ancient Greece. Soranus, the first- and second-century A.D. Greek physician, repeatedly told his Greco-Roman audience that wet nurses should be Greek.

  Hindus revered, and continue to revere, cows. In Sanskrit the word for cow is aghnya, which means “that which cannot be slaughtered.” Hinduism has a creation myth in which the god Vishnu churns a sea of milk to create the universe.

  The early Christians regarded all this cow worship as pagan, but still kept a special place for milk—human milk, that is—in their religion. The Virgin Mary was continually depicted exposing a breast and lactating. A leading Christian figure, the twelfth-century Bernard of Clairvaux, was said to have derived his inspiration from the Virgin Mary, who had appeared to him, bared a breast, and squirted three drops of milk into his mouth.

  Medieval Christianity abounds with stories of people drinking Mary’s milk, and even, in a few inexplicable cases, Christ’s milk. These people received not Bernard’s circumspect three drops, but rather a long, arched stream, at least according to some artists. One ignorant monk was said to have acquired great wisdom when the soft, sweet-spoken Mary bade him come close, bared her breasts, and had him suck at length on them. All this reflects the old and enduring Christian belief that the breastfed child acquired the traits of the woman who fed her or him.

  Christians in the Middle Ages thought that milk was blood that had turned white when it traveled to the breast, which is why milk was banned on meatless holy days—more than half the days of the year. Japanese Buddhists had the same belief and avoided consuming dairy products. They looked down on Westerners, who they thought consumed too much dairy. They claimed they could smell it on them, and even into the twentieth century used the pejorative term Batā dasaku, “butter stinker,” for a Westerner.

  Nor have Jews ever been comfortable with the consumption of dairy. In Exodus, it states, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” This has been interpreted as an absolute ban on eating any meat product, even chicken, in the same meal as any dairy product.

  And yet even in ancient times, there have always been those who insisted on the health-giving qualities of milk. A Sumerian cuneiform tablet states that milk and laban, a yogurt-like sour drink, drive off illness. Pliny the Elder, the first-century A.D. Roman writer, claimed that milk was an effective antidote for those who swallowed quicksilver.

  Producing milk is what defines a mammal. The scientific class Mammalia, to which humans belong, is so labeled from the Latin mammal, meaning “of the breast.” We are the milk-producing class of animals, and we share milk among ourselves, although animals other than humans usually drink only the milk of their mothers unless humans intervene.

  Still, to varying degrees, most mammal milk is acceptable food. And which milk is the best milk is one of history’s unending debates. There is not even universal agreement that human milk is best for humans.

  Different milks have varying amounts of fats, proteins, and lactose, and arguments abound over the relative merits and possible harms of each. For many centuries, milk with a high fat content was considered to be the best, and low-fat or skimmed milk was considered fraudulent—in fact, selling it was often illegal. Cow breeds that produce milk with a high fat content, such as Ayrshires, Jerseys, and Guernseys, have always been valued, especially for cheesemaking.

  Jersey

  It is often stated that milk, produced by nature to feed newborns, is the ideal food. And it has long been recognized that newborn humans, calves, and lambs do not have the exact same needs. Early on, people understood that the milks of different species varied somehow, though it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that those differences were quantified.

  Each species has its own unique milk, designed by nature to meet its needs. Young whales have to build a layer of fa
t quickly in order to survive, and so whale milk is 34.8 percent fat, as opposed to human milk, which is only 4.5 percent fat. Northern seals also have to acquire fat quickly; a gray seal’s milk is 53.2 percent fat, making it about the fattiest milk of all. Even aside from the logistical problems of milking gray seals, let alone whales, their high-fat milk is not suitable for us.

  Human babies like and need milk that is 4.5 percent fat, only 1.1 percent protein, 6.8 percent lactose, and about 87 percent water. Not surprisingly, one of the milks closest to that of humans comes from monkeys. But while we have managed, with considerable ease, to accept the idea of feeding our young on the milks of other animals, we prefer that those animals not be too biologically similar. Most societies would find the idea of monkey dairies upsetting.

  Milk also contains more than just fat, protein, lactose, and water. There are such things as cholesterol and linoleic acid to consider. For example, buffalo’s milk, which people drink in India and the Philippines and use to make mozzarella cheese in southern Italy, has more fat but less cholesterol than cow’s milk. Cow’s milk also lacks linoleic acid, which is considered important for human brain growth. And while cow’s milk has four times as much protein as human milk, most of the extra protein is in the form of casein, which has valuable commercial applications but is not needed in that quantity for a human baby’s development.

  Human milk has far more lactose than most other milks. Lactose is a sugar, so all milks are a bit sweet, but human milk is particularly sweet. Humans and most other mammals develop a fondness for sweets, probably because of their first food.

  Before sugar cane and beet sugar became ubiquitous, honey was the number one sweet available. Milk was a close second, though, which is why the two were often grouped together. In a Vedic song of India, at least as old as the Old Testament, Rigveda says to Indra,

  With honey of the bees is milk mixed,

  Come quick. Run and drink.

  In the Old Testament, there are twenty references to milk and honey amid some fifty references to milk alone—human, cow, and goat. Most famously, the Hebrews are promised a land of milk and honey, a land of rare sweets.