This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf Copyright © 2008 by Anne Mendelson All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. eBook ISBN: 978-0-38535121-8 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4000-4410-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mendelson, Anne. Milk : the surprising story of milk through the ages / by Anne Mendelson.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4000-4410-8 1. Milk—History. 2. Cookery (Milk) I. Title. SF251.M46 2008 641.3’7109—dc22 2008019620 Manufactured in the United States v3.1 IN MEMORIAM M.I. E.S.M. ILLUSTRATIONS CREDITS AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS 1.1 (Richard Lydekker, Royal Natural History [vol. 2], 1894) 1.2 (Richard Lydekker, Wild Oxen, Sheep, and Goats, 1898), 1.4 and 1.5 (John G. Wood, Our Living World [American edition], 1885), 2.4 (William Youatt, Cattle, 1834), 5.3 and 5.11 (John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 1891) COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS: 1.3 (Jean Francois Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie, p. 1844–99), 1.6 (Illustrated London News, 1864), 1.7 (Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, 1810), 1.8 and 2.5 (Charles Louis Flint, Milch Cows and Dairy Farming, 1858), 2.1 (George W. Thornbury, Old and New London [vol. 4], 1872), 2.3 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 15, 1858), 6.4 (Magasin pittoresque, 1837) THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1.9 (The Cries of New York, 1845 edition, NYHS negative #54406), 2.2 (Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1878, NYHS negative #80839d) THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA 4.1 (Australian Illustrated Weekly, November 11, 1893) RALPH SELITZER, The Dairy Industry in America, 1976 5.1, 5.9, 5.10 HEDWIG DORN, Zur Stütze der Hausfrau, 1918 5.5, 5.8, 5.12, 6.7, 6.8, 8.3 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface PART I MILK, MILCH ANIMALS, AND COOKING Beginnings and Traditions THE STORY OF MODERN MILK Or, Is This What We Really Want? RAW VS. PASTEURIZED, ORGANIC VS. CONVENTIONAL A Minority Opinion WHITE MAGIC 101 PART II • RECIPES FRESH MILK AND CREAM YOGURT CULTURED MILK AND CREAM BUTTER AND TRUE BUTTERMILK FRESH CHEESES (INCLUDING BRINED CHEESES) A Note on Shopping Sources Acknowledgments Select Bibliography Index A Note About the Author Other Books by This Author PREFACE T his book has grown out of a lifelong love of milk and fresh dairy products. It is the culinary guidebook, dairy-chemistry-for-cooks primer, and eclectic recipe collection that I always vainly wished somebody had written. And it developed into something else that I’d always wanted to find: a geographical-historical exploration of the world’s milky ways, including those that have shaped the modern American milk supply for better or worse. Milk itself would have been a fascinating subject at any time in history. It is really and truly the First Food, at least for all members of the mammal class. The practice of milking was an anchor of many prehistoric civilizations, one of humanity’s oldest and deepest bonds with domestic animals. The animals raised for the purpose are remarkable creatures, though they remain nearly invisible to most of the people who put milk on shopping lists. What they produce is a biochemical marvel that modern science has not yet finished analyzing. Its still-unplumbed complexities are exactly what make it irreplaceable in a huge number of the world’s cuisines. In the ancient world it often had religious significance as a ritual offering; in India it still has sacred associations. On a more earthbound level, it has figured tremendously in the farm econo-mies of most industrialized nations. But I’m not sure that any previous historical juncture would have been an equally fruitful—or fraught—moment for stepping back to survey the many dimensions of milk, especially in the United States. It gets lots of headlines these days, some of them pleasanter reading than others. Among the most striking features of the early twenty-first-century dairy scene are: • Milk in many ways exemplifies an American love-hate relationship with food, an endless tug-of-war between exalting and demonizing things on the basis of medical claims and counterclaims. • It is also an alarming example of farming and processing technology somehow run amok, careening down ever more extreme paths with less and less connection to anything recognizable as real milk. • On a more encouraging note, a resurgence of small-scale dairying and dairy farming is proceeding under our noses just as many people become aware of a hunger for something not satisfied by featureless, taken-for-granted, mass-produced milk and fresh dairy products. Today we have unprecedented opportunities to taste milk, cream, butter, fresh cheeses, and other simple milk-derived foods made by, and for, people who know what flavor is. • Most powerfully of all, milk today represents a time of change in American culinary perspective, stemming from massive change in this nation’s ethnic makeup. Part of the impetus behind this book was my eagerness to share the voyages of culinary discovery that began for me in immigrant neighborhoods of northern New Jersey and ended by completely reshaping my understanding of milk’s place in world history, not to say the world’s kitchens. What I learned, in a nutshell, is that the usual American ways with milk and dairy products are only a narrow, anomalous sidetrack from something immensely larger, richer, and more ancient. It’s my hope that other people will be as bowled over as I have been on seeing how much new Americans from diverse cooking traditions have to teach us about this humble substance. My entry point to enlightenment was yogurt—not what I’d known from American pop versions but the plain creamy yogurt that kept turning up as sauce, drink, condiment, and just all-around player in small Greek, Bosnian, Turkish, Israeli, Persian, Afghan, and Indian restaurants. Slowly it dawned on me that in simple fermented yogurt I was tasting something that might have been eaten or drunk by Old Testament patriarchs, Sumerian lawgivers, Homeric heroes, Hindu gods, or the flower of Persian chivalry. The uses I saw it being put to in modest little eateries made me realize how little I’d really known about cooking with milk and dairy products. As the larger picture opened up to me and I began trying to delve into chapters of the culinary past that no one else seemed to have written, I gradually arrived at a thoroughly rearranged world view of milk and