Milk Read online

  In the endless arguments over which animal had the healthiest milk, Anthimus favored goats, while Marcus Terentius Varro, a first-century B.C.E. Roman writer, favored sheep. Galen, the prominent Greek physician in third-century A.D. Rome, thought goat’s milk most nourishing but cow’s milk more medicinal and more soothing for the sick. He also praised sheep’s milk as the sweetest. Wealthy Roman women used donkey’s milk as a cosmetic because it was supposed to both smooth out wrinkles and make skin whiter.

  Most everyone put cow’s milk—and, by extension, cow cheeses—a distant third. But in the latter part of the Roman Empire, cow’s-milk cheeses became increasingly popular. Apicius specifies cow’s-milk cheese in some of his recipes.

  It was commonly believed that milk was bad for the teeth. Today we believe that milk is good for the teeth because of its high calcium content, but how much calcium is healthful is another long-running debate. The Roman idea that milk is harmful to teeth persisted for centuries. The seventeenth-century English physician Tobias Venner advised his readers to gargle with wine or strong beer after drinking milk.

  Anthimus stated that the only really salutary way to drink milk was while it was still warm from the udder. This idea persisted for many centuries, until the age of refrigeration. Many people preferred to go to a farm to drink milk, or sometimes had the animal brought to them. In numerous cities from London to Havana until the twentieth century, milk deliveries were sometimes made by leading a cow from door to door.

  Many believed that milk needed to be consumed on an empty stomach because food in the stomach caused curdling, which could be dangerous. Galen’s remedy for this was to always mix fresh milk with honey, though he admitted that that didn’t work for everyone. He also advised using other additives, such as salt and mint.

  Galen’s extensive writings on milk apparently influenced many who came after him, including Platina, the Renaissance food writer, who in turn influenced other people over the next few centuries. For example, Platina’s advice not to drink milk at the end of the meal was reiterated a century later by the Spanish medical writer Francisco Núñez de Oria.

  Platina’s opinions about drinking milk mirror Galen’s:

  [Milk] is better in spring than summer, and better in summer than autumn or winter. It ought to be drunk on an empty stomach, warm as it comes from the udder, and one ought to abstain from other food while it settles in the stomach. It is least harmful drunk as curd at the first course in spring and summer, for taken after the meal, as we are generally accustomed to do, it either spoils immediately or draws other undigested food with it to the bottom. One should also be quiet after taking it so that it will not sour in the stomach from shaking … One must, however, avoid too much use of milk, for it makes the keenness of the eyes duller and generates stones in kidneys and bladder.

  In Roman writing there were frequent warnings about excess, because they loved excess, especially in the first and second centuries. They had a popular cheese spread called moretum, which means salad. The name suggests that the spread was more vegetable than cheese, except that the vegetable in question was garlic. A late-first-century poem titled “Moretum”—historians debate its author—describes the preparing of the dish. It does not specify the amount of cheese, but states that the four heads of garlic should be separated, peeled, and crushed before being combined with the cheese, undoubtedly resulting in an extremely powerful garlic cheese spread. The poem states:

  The vapor keen doth oft assail the man’s

  Uncovered nostrils, and with face and nose

  Retracted doth he curse his early meal;

  With back of hand his weeping eyes he oft

  Doth wipe, and raging, heaps reviling on

  The undeserving smoke. The work advanced:

  No longer full of jottings as before,

  But steadily the pestle circles smooth

  Described. Some drops of olive oil he now

  Instills, and pours upon its strength besides

  A little of his scanty vinegar,

  And mixes once again his handiwork,

  And mixed withdraws it: then with fingers twain

  Round all the mortar doth he go at last

  And into one coherent ball doth bring

  The different portions, that it may the name

  And likeness of a finished salad fit.

  This concoction, no doubt, was startling to the digestive system.

  4

  BUTTERY BARBARIANS

  Though Christianity began in the Middle East and only later spread to the dairy country of northern Europe, it has always been a milk-worshipping faith. In the early communions, the sip that represented the blood of Christ was often taken from a goblet of milk.

  According to many authorities, using milk rather than wine to represent the blood of Christ was logical because milk was believed to be a form of white blood. This idea long predated Christianity, but the early Christians seized upon it. In a lengthy 198 A.D. treatise entitled Paedagogus, Clement of Alexandria, an early Christian theologian, presented several arguments for the use of milk in Christian ritual. He opined that a mother’s milk was blood that had been sweetened and purified, and that semen was blood that had been whipped into a foam.

  Clement also pointed out that in 1 Corinthians 3:2, Paul compares his teachings to milk and meat—nourishment. Clement wrote, “The blood of the Word has been also exhibited as milk.”

  Clement proposes an unappetizing formula: mixing milk with wine as a means to touch immortality. The wine would curdle the milk and the whey could be drained off, just as the drawing off of lust and other impure thoughts could lead a man or woman to eternal life.

  It is not difficult to imagine why wine mixed with milk did not become an established ritual. Nonetheless, the use of milk instead of wine in religious ceremony stubbornly endured despite Pope Julius I’s condemnation of it in 340 A.D. Similarly, the practice of feeding a baby milk with honey for its first communion continued well into the Middle Ages. Each of the foods used in the rituals had significance: bread for the body of Christ, wine for the blood of Christ, and milk and honey for the Promised Land.

  Even in the Middle East, the Christian tie to milk never completely disappeared. There was said to be a cave in Bethlehem where the Virgin Mary had nursed Jesus and spilled a drop of milk. Women who were barren or could not produce milk went there for help.

  Madonna of the Milk by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (ca. 1311–1348) depicts the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Christ. Oratorio di S. Bernardino, Siena, Italy. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)

  Perhaps it was not a coincidence that just as Pope Julius was banning the use of milk in ritual, Christianity was spreading to the dairy-loving barbarians. Saint Brigid, the fifth-century patroness of milk- and butter-loving Ireland, said to have been nourished as a baby by a white-and-red cow, was the revered saint of dairy farmers, cattle, and milkmaids in the newly Christian north.

  In the early Middle Ages, goats and sheep were preferred to cows except in a few regions such as the Alps, and liquid milk, fragile and unstable as it is, even in a cool climate, was seldom commercialized. Cheese and butter were the primary dairy products, and cream was almost always churned into butter. The by-product, buttermilk, was very popular.

  Ancient and medieval butter was often buried in order to ferment it slightly. In Ireland, butter was buried in peat bogs. Before industrial dairies, butter was not entirely fat, no matter how well churned the cream was, and even today, butter is usually between 75 percent and 85 percent fat. French butter makes better pastry than American butter because it contains more fat and less water.

  Strabo’s observation about the Celts, that they were a dairy-eating people, has remained true to this day. But the Celts were not among the butter-eating barbarians who took over Rome; that victory belonged to the Franks, Vandals, and Goths, restless tribesmen who lived on meat, milk, and cheese and roamed about in constant search of new pastureland.

  The Celts came from the upper Danube a
nd, by the fifth century B.C.E., controlled much of northern Europe. But in time they were driven out of their ancestral homeland to Europe’s Atlantic edges, which proved good places for dairying. They settled down in what is now Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, the Breton coast of France, and, with less of a cultural connection, northwest Spain. They also became known for their butter. The Irish boiled milk with a seaweed known as cairigin or Irish moss and sweetened it with honey.

  The English, whose model for imperialism was the Romans, sneered Roman-like at what they thought was the barbaric overuse of butter by the Irish. Fynes Moryson, secretary to the viceroy, who spent much time in Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth I, reported that the Irish “swallow whole lumps of filthy butter.”

  In his 1672 travel book, the geographer and mapmaker Albert Jouvin de Rochefort wrote, more generously, “Butter is in Brittany, like in nowhere else in France, a centerpiece of a rich and ancient cultural tradition.” It was also often observed that the Bretons, or people who live in Brittany, ate far more butter and far less cheese than the French, who were themselves butter eaters, at least in the north.

  The Bretons were butter gourmets and had the unwelcome habit of pinching a sample before buying. Celts, and specifically Bretons, were also salt makers. They always salted their butter, and they had very strong opinions about what was undersalted or oversalted. They used butter molds made of carved wood and brought specially molded decorative butters to weddings and funerals.

  One of the great expressions of the Celts’ love for butter is the many butter cakes that are made throughout the Celtic world. These are simple cakes designed to taste as buttery as possible. Brittany is especially known for two versions, the kouign amann, which in the Breton dialect of the Celtic language means “butter cake,” and the gâteau breton, which in French means “Brittany cake.” The gâteau breton appears to be the more traditional of the two, as it uses the buckwheat flour that is typical of Brittany, many eggs, and more butter than does the kouign amann, and it is baked in a cast-iron skillet, like an old Celtic cake. But there is no record of it before the Paris Exposition of 1863, which is about the time the baker Yves-René Scordia invented the kouign amann.

  Butter cakes, along with shortbreads, had been around for centuries before these versions from Brittany, however. An example is the Irish scone. Scones are traditionally cooked on a griddle, which is typical of old Celtic baking, and are probably of Scottish origin; the word “scone” comes from Gaelic.

  Here is a recipe, similar to the gâteau breton but formed into smaller cakes and made with white flour, from Florence Irwin of County Down on the Irish Sea in what is now Northern Ireland. At the beginning of the twentieth century, she traveled around County Down teaching “domestic science” and recording and trying the old traditional recipes of her students. Note the quantity of butter, probably salted, and the touch of buttermilk used in this Celtic standard. Also note that despite the already buttery taste of these small cakes, Irwin suggests splitting them open on the day they are baked and spreading them with yet more butter. They are to be eaten while they are still warm.

  1 lb flour, 4 to 6 ozs butter, 2 ozs castor sugar, good pinch salt, small teaspoonful bicarbonate of soda, small teaspoonful cream of tartar, buttermilk.

  Sieve the dry ingredients. Rub in the butter very lightly, handling as little as possible. Using a knife mix to a dough. Turn on to floured board. Very lightly knead. Roll out half to three quarters of an inch thick. Cut in rounds. Brush with buttermilk. Bake in a hot oven till risen and brown.

  The original Celtic butter cake would not have had leavening and would have been baked on a griddle, not in an oven. The gâteau breton is baked in an iron skillet because that is reminiscent of the iron griddle that came before it. In much of Europe, ovens were not features of homes. Often food had to be taken to a baker to be baked, which is the meaning of the French adjective boulangère for certain stews and meat pies that were taken to the baker. But homes had griddles, known in Scotland as “girdles.” Originally, a griddle was a flat stone, called a bakestone in England, heated by a fire. Later, the griddles were made of metal. They are still used in some Celtic places for small cakes such as drop scones—the original of the Irish scone above—and Welsh cakes, which in Welsh Celtic are still called pice ar y maen, cakes on the stone. Griddle cooking is usually done with buckwheat, barley, or oats, not white flour, and the Scottish also have oatcakes, which are usually made with milk, not butter, and then served buttered.

  Welsh cakes were made of barley and milk beaten together into a thick batter that was put in an earthen jug and then poured onto a hot griddle in discs the size of a small saucer. They were only about a third of an inch thick and were still soft when done. They were served with butter.

  What does this sound like? Yes, they are pancakes. Pancakes are griddle cakes made with milk or sometimes buttermilk. The first-century Roman cook Apicius made very thin pancakes and served them with honey. And the Breton pancakes may have had a Roman origin, as they, too, are thin and are called crêpes, which comes from the Latin word for “curl.” All European pancakes, including the Welsh and the Breton versions, are made from a flour-and-milk batter poured on a griddle, but crêpes were originally made with buckwheat.

  It is not certain when the Europeans started making pancakes, but they certainly did so before the fifteenth century. In 1615, when pancakes were becoming extremely popular in England, Gervase Markham, a poet and contemporary of Shakespeare, published a cookbook and home guide that became a huge bestseller, The English Huswife. In it he stated erroneously that pancakes were more delicate when made with water instead of milk. “There be some who mix pancakes with new milk or cream, but that makes them tough, cloying, crisp.” The book sold well, but the English people kept making their pancakes with milk.

  The idea of making pancakes with water may have been born out of poverty. William Ellis, an eighteenth-century farmer, was a popular author who wrote about farming, home management, and cooking. In his 1750 book, Country Housewife Family Companion, he wrote:

  HOW WATER PANCAKES ARE MADE BY POOR PEOPLE

  This pancake is made by many poor, day-laboring men’s wives, who when they cannot afford to make better, make this: by stirring wheat flower [sic] with water instead of milk for if they can get milk, they generally think it put to a better use when they make milk porridge of it for their family. The flower and water being stirred into a batter consistence, with a sprinkling of salt and flowered ginger, they fry the pancakes in lard, or other fat, and without any sugar they and their families make a good meal of them.

  Ellis follows this recipe with one titled “How Pancakes are made for rich people.” This second recipe uses cream rather than milk, a lot of butter, and a heavy sprinkling of sugar. This suggests that fresh milk was a luxury item not available to urban poor people. In the eighteenth century, the upper-class English wanted their food to be as rich as possible and in this sense, water pancakes were lighter.

  The leading articulator of this rich diet, the last preindustrial British cuisine, was Hannah Glasse, whose books were so popular that Dr. Johnson claimed there was no such person and Hannah Glasse must be the nom de plume of a man. But Hannah did exist, she was a woman, and she cooked with endless quantities of cream and butter. The Romans would have been appalled by all the dairy but would have loved the sense of excess. In her 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, she offered one recipe for pancakes with milk and five with cream. Here is one. Like almost all Glasse recipes, it is not original, and others were also making pancakes with cream.

  FINE PANCAKES

  Take half a pint of cream, half a pint of sack [sherry], the yolks of eighteen eggs beat fine, and a little salt, half a pound of fine sugar, a little beaten cinnamon, Mace, and nutmeg, then put in as much flour as will run thin over the pan, and fry them in fresh butter.

  In Scotland, the grain of choice was oats. The following recipe comes from the Scotswoman Elizabeth
Cleland in 1755, but this way of making pancakes began centuries earlier (few Scottish recipes were recorded before the eighteenth century). The recipe’s lemon peel, oranges, nutmeg, and sugar were probably eighteenth-century additions. Also, the original pancakes would have been cooked on a griddle, not in a pan, and would not have required butter.

  Cleland included seven different pancake recipes in her book. Some used Scottish units of measurement, and it may have been Scottish nationalism that led Cleland to ignore the 1707 Act of Union that ordered all Scottish measures to be replaced by English ones. She did switch some measures, but not those related to volume. A chopin is a quart, a mutchkin is a pint, and a gill is a quarter of a pint:

  OATMEAL PANCAKES

  Boil a chopin of milk and blend into it a mutchkin of flour of oatmeal, thus: keep a little milk, and mix the meal by degrees in it. Then stir in the boiling milk; when it is pretty thick, put it to cool, then beat up six eggs with sugar, nutmeg, and the grate of a lemon, and a little salt. Stir all together and then fry in butter putting in a spoonful of the batter at a time. Serve them up hot with beat butter, orange and sugar.

  In the Middle Ages in Ireland, as in most Celtic countries, dairy foods were central to the diet. But they were not always available to the poor. Only affluent people owned livestock, and butter, buried in peat bogs to age like a rare treasure, was particularly valued—and expensive.

  Medieval Irish literature praised milk. In Tochmarc Ailbe, “The Wooing of Ailbe,” an Irish tale dating back to the eleventh, tenth, or ninth century—the date is not certain—milk was described as “Good when fresh, good when old, good when thick, good when thin.” The milk of the poor was probably diluted with water so that it would stretch farther. Though milk was probably rarely drunk; rather, it would usually have been thickened with rennet to make cheese, or boiled with herbs and served as a heavy grain porridge.