Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Celts made both soft cheeses and harder ones. The harder ones were better for travel and storage. And apparently, sometimes the cheese was very hard. In the twelfth-century Irish story Aided Meidb, “The Violent Death of Medb,” a man named Furbaide plotted the assassination of Queen Medb thus: The queen bathed in a well on an island every day. Furbaide planted a stick in the ground near the well at just the right height, tied a rope to it of just the right length, and stretched the rope to a spot where he was hiding on the mainland. Then he used the rope of just the right length and the stick of just the right height to practice with a slingshot every day until he had mastered incredible accuracy. And then one day there the queen was, bathing in the well with her head sticking out, her forehead perfectly exposed. With no time to find the perfect stone, Furbaide grabbed the first thing he could find, a piece of hard cheese, and fired. He hit his target perfectly and killed the queen.

  To hear the Romans tell it, the barbarians to their north were swilling milk by the mugful. Though Caesar had been appalled by how much milk and meat the northerners ate and drank, in actuality, they were consuming milk conservatively. It was precious, not abundantly available, and they usually used it to make cheese or a broth with herbs. Such broths were also made with ale or only water, so a milk broth was probably a special treat.

  Milk was so important to the barbarians that a dry cow was considered to be a family crisis; most families only had one or two cows. A cow was an expensive animal to maintain.

  Scots, particularly in the Highlands, were more interested in dairy than in meat. Originally, they had kept sheep, primarily for their wool, but also for their milk. Sheep, however, are not great milk producers. Later, when the Scots started owning cows, they used them for hauling and farm work as well as milking. Only cows that could no longer work or produce milk were slaughtered, meaning that the Scots probably ate a low grade of meat. Quality meat would have been only for the wealthy. Butter was sold commercially, and there was “rent-butter”—tenant farmers paying off landlords in butter. Twice a year, the Scots mixed butter with tar and swabbed it on their sheep to protect them from developing sores.

  For centuries, small sheep’s-milk cheeses wrapped in seaweed or ashes were the norm in Scotland. The cow’s-milk cheeses for which Scotland later became known were only introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  In the Shetland Islands of Scotland there were a variety of dairy dishes with Nordic names, suggesting that the fishermen learned them from the Scandinavians, who had a wealth of dairy dishes. Blaund was whey that was strained from buttermilk and slightly fermented so that it had effervescence. Strabba, known in Norway as stoppen, was whipped curdled milk eaten with fruit. Kloks was clotted milk with cinnamon. Cooking it turned it yellowish, and it is said to have resembled modern condensed milk.

  There are many traditional dairy foods in the Shetlands. Beest is a drink of colostrum with a little water added. It could be curdled by cooking to make a kind of cheese or mixed with sugar, salt, and caraway seeds for a pudding. They so loved buttermilk that in the winter when there was no butter making, they made fake buttermilk by souring potato water.

  Milk was scarce, and ways of stretching the milk supply were always sought. As with the Celts, one way to do it was to dilute it with water. In time, this was regarded as fraudulent, but originally it was an openly acknowledged attempt to stretch the milk supply.

  The Scottish families also used to stretch their milk by frothing it into what was known as froh-milk or, in Gaelic, omhan. They used a frothing stick that had a cross at one end with cow tail hairs attached. The stick would be rubbed between the hands until the milk frothed. A glass of milk could be almost doubled in this way. Sometimes whey was frothed, and in hard times, poor Highlanders lived on almost nothing but this high-protein drink.

  Milk shortages continued in Scotland and many other countries until the eighteenth century, when dairying became a commercial rather than a family activity. Only then did milk and other dairy products become affordable commodities.

  Both buttermilk and whey were popular drinks throughout Scotland. In Edinburgh, people were passionate about buttermilk. It may seem inevitable that a society of butter eaters would be buttermilk drinkers, but that does not necessarily follow. Certainly not all cheesemakers are whey drinkers, even though the cheesemaking process leaves behind an enormous quantity of whey. Many cheesemakers gave their leftover whey to farm animals, especially pigs, as is still the custom today—and the reason why pigs are often raised on dairy farms.

  In Anglo-Saxon society, a female slave was given whey to drink in the summer, probably because this was cheesemaking time and whey was abundantly available. Shepherds were also entitled to a share of whey or buttermilk, and whey was a common payment for labor even after the 1066 conquest by the Normans. Whey was a form of payment for farm workers in Ireland as well.

  Food that is given to workers is always regarded as having low status, and by the sixteenth century, whey and buttermilk were not highly thought of in England. In 1615 the poet Gervase Markham recommended giving buttermilk away to poor people:

  The best use of buttermilk for the able housewife is charitably to bestow it on the poor neighbors whose wants do daily cry out for sustenance and no doubt that she shall find the profit thereof in a divine place as well as in her earthly business.

  About whey, Markham wrote, “Its general use differeth not from that of buttermilk, for either you shall preserve it to bestow on the poor, because it is a good drink for the laboring man, or keep it to make curds out of it, or lastly to nourish and bring up your swine.”

  The Scots had a dish whose popularity lasted into the twentieth century. Cream and whey were beaten with a frothing stick, and after the mixture thickened, toasted oatmeal was sprinkled on top.

  Ever since the Vikings settled Iceland in the ninth century, whey has been an important product there. This may also have been true even earlier, when the island was inhabited by Celtic monks. A rocky, volcanic, glacier-studded land, surrounded by rich fishing grounds but containing few trees, fruits, grains, grasses, or vegetables, Iceland was not a place where anything edible was discarded. Its wide rocky swaths were suitable for sheep, but there was only limited grassland for grazing cows. Originally, most Icelandic dairy products were made from sheep’s milk.

  An Icelandic milkmaid, 1922, from People All Nations: Their Life Today and the Story of Their Past, volume IV: Georgia to Italy, edited by JA Hammerton and published by the Educational Book Company, London, 1922. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)

  In Iceland’s most famous novel, Independent People, by the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, Rosa, a farmer’s wife, suggests getting a cow. This is enough to convince her husband, Bjartur, that Rosa is having a nervous breakdown. “Where’s your field, then?” he demands. She says that she has found this one rich grassland. “When I’m busy in the meadow raking,” she says, “I think about milk.”

  The reality was that there were few grasses hearty enough to live through the Icelandic winter. And the only cows that could survive were the brown-and-white ones introduced by the Vikings, producers of excellent milk from the island’s tough but unusually rich grass. Even today, the country’s brown-and-white cows—like its sheep, horses, and people—are direct descendants of Viking stock.

  Skyr, originally a sheep’s-milk product and later one made from cow’s milk, is a by-product of a by-product. When Icelanders separated cream to make butter, they were left with skim milk. They soured it, and condensed it, to produce a unique product vaguely resembling yogurt. It is much denser than yogurt, however, and far more complicated and costly to make.

  In making skyr, a great deal of whey is produced by condensing the moisture from the skim milk. And originally, the whey was not a by-product of making skyr, but the other way around—it was whey they wanted, and skyr was a by-product. Skyr was at first commonly eaten as a kind of porridge, cooked with Icelandic moss, because there was little grain i
n Iceland.

  The name skyr is thought to have come from skeroa, meaning to cut, or skilia, meaning to divide. The making of skyr has been documented back to the fourteenth century, though earlier versions of it, referred to as “curd,” may not have been as smooth as the ones produced now. In the National Museum of Iceland are dairy remnants found by nineteenth-century archaeologists that are thought to be skyr dating back to the year 1000. Skyr is also mentioned in the medieval Icelandic sagas, the starting block for both history and literature in Iceland. In Egil’s Saga, which takes place in the ninth and tenth centuries but was written in the thirteenth, a scene unfolds in which Egil and his men are eating bowls of curds, thought to be skyr.

  But in medieval times, it was whey, far more than skyr, that was in demand. Whey was often made into a drink, mysa. In the Króka-Refs saga, The Saga of Ref the Sly, set in the tenth century though written in the fourteenth, the king explains that “there is a drink in Iceland called mysa.”

  Because the Icelanders had no grain, they could not make beer like other Northern Europeans. And so the standard Icelandic beverage was soured whey. People fermented the whey by putting mysa in barrels with holes in the lid. For a time, impurities, such as bits of skyr, would bubble up through the holes and be removed. The barrel would then be retopped with fresh whey and sealed. The longer the whey was barreled, the sourer it became. Some drank it after a few months and others kept it for years.

  The soured mysa turned into an alcoholic drink called syra. A small amount of syra was added to water to make blanda. Sometimes herbs or berries were added. Sometimes a bag of thyme was added to the whey barrel.

  Syra was the standard drink of Iceland for many centuries. Before they went to sea, fishermen were guaranteed a supply of syra. When they couldn’t get it, they tried to make a substitute by placing soured herbs in water.

  Poor Iceland not only lacked grain, it also did not have much salt, which is why its commercial fish was air-dried rather than salted—stockfish, dried unsalted fish, rather than salt fish. Iceland did not even have enough strong sunlight to make sea salt. But whey could be used to preserve food. Butter was preserved in syra, which made it sour rather than salted. Blood sausages were also preserved in syra, as was a wide range of meats, fish, and vegetables. This made for a cuisine that was predominantly sour rather than salty. And in a stellar example of how the poor could make something out of nothing, sheep bones were left in syra to eventually decompose and be cooked into a sour high-calcium gruel. Sometimes, too, a little syra was added for flavor, the way other cultures use salt.

  Numerous cultures have made cheese from whey, which is a triumph of conservation—making a valued product from what many thought was a worthless by-product to feed pigs. The most famous whey cheese is Italian ricotta, a name that expresses this economy of production, as it means “recooked.” Milk is cooked to make cheese, and the whey that is pressed out is recooked at a very high temperature to make ricotta. There are cheese descriptions from ancient Greece that sound as if they could be ricotta, but it is generally thought that ricotta originated in medieval Sicily. The name for it there was zammatàru, which means “dairy farmer” and comes from the Arab word za’ama, which means “cow.” Despite this origin, it is widely held in Italy today that the best ricotta is made from sheep’s milk. Some historians posit that ricotta was developed between the ninth and eleventh centuries when Arabs occupied the island, but at the very least, Sicilian ricotta is as old as the eleventh century, when it appeared in a Latin translation of a book by the Arab doctor Ibn Butlan.

  During the Renaissance, the food writer Platina described ricotta in this way:

  It is white and not unpleasant to taste. Less healthful than fresh or medium aged cheese, it is considered better than aged or over salty. Cooks mix it into many vegetable ragouts.

  Making ricotta, from Tacuinum Sanitatis, originally Taqwim es siha [The preservation of health], ca. 1445–1451 by Ibn Butlân, an Iraqi physician. Painting on paper. (Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

  Drinking whey has fallen out of fashion in most countries today, but it endured well into the nineteenth century, primarily for health reasons. Platina suggested drinking whey as a medicine “because it cools the liver and blood and makes a way to purge the body of poisons.” An 1846 London book of Jewish cooking, The Jewish Manual, authored anonymously by “a lady,” recommends three whey drinks—plain, wine, and tamarind, all of which appear in a chapter titled “Receipts for Invalids.” Apparently, at the time, a Londoner who wanted to drink whey could no longer buy it but had to make it from milk herself. Here are The Jewish Manual’s three whey recipes:

  First, the plain recipe:

  Put into boiling milk so much lemon juice or vinegar that it will turn it, and make the milk clear, strain, add hot water and sweeten.

  Next, one with wine:

  Set on the fire in a saucepan a pint of milk, when it boils, pour in as much white wine as will turn it to curds, boil it up, let the curds settle, strain off, and add a little boiling water, and sweeten to taste.

  Finally, one that used tamarinds:

  Boil three ounces of tamarinds in two pints of milk, strain off the curds and let it cool. This is a very refreshing drink.

  The Jewish Manual’s chapter for invalids also offers recipes for numerous other milk dishes. Among them is “restorative milk,” which is cooked with isinglass, a product from the dried swim bladders of fish that is usually used for clarifying gelatin. Another recipe, harking back to the ancients, is for making milk porridge:

  Make a fine gruel with new milk without adding any water. Strain it when sufficiently thick, and sweeten with white sugar. This is extremely nutritive and fattening.

  The manual’s author does not specify which grain to use when making porridge, though barley was much favored at the time. But how many recipes can be found for how to gain weight?

  In Cornwall and the west country of England, not all cream was used for making butter. Clotted cream was also a tradition. The earliest written records of clotted cream date from the sixteenth century, but the food is probably even older. Originally, it was developed as a way of preserving cream. Fresh cream turns very quickly; bottled clotted cream can keep for two weeks.

  When making clotted cream, as when making butter, fresh milk is left for about eight hours until the cream rises to the top. Today, this is done by separator machines, but in earlier times, milk from a morning milking would be left out until late afternoon and milk from an afternoon milking would be left until morning. Then the milk would be slowly simmered for several hours at a low heat in a shallow brass or earthenware pan over a low charcoal fire until the cream had a bubbly crust. It would then be left to cool, and the clotted cream, which is much thicker than natural cream, would be skimmed off.

  In much of Europe, there was also a tradition of freshly curdled milk—which the Romans had recommended as the most healthful milk. In Cornwall it was called junket. Hannah Glasse, in her 1742 The Compleat Confectioner: or The Whole Art of Confectionary Made Plain and Easy, gave this recipe for junket:

  Take a quart of new milk and a pint of cream; put it warm together, with a spoonful of good rennet, and cover it with a cloth wrung out of cold water; gather your curd, put it in rushes till the whey is run out and serve it either with or without cream.

  Note the direction for using “new milk.” Experience had taught cooks that when working with fresh milk that needs to stand, the fresher the milk the better.

  Hannah Glasse also offered this pleasant variation of junket, which she called “stone cream”:

  Take a pint and a half of thick cream, boil it in a blade of mace and a stick of cinnamon, with six spoonfuls of orange flower water, sweeten it to your taste, and boil it till thick, pour it out, and keep stirring till almost cold, then put in a small spoonful of rennet, and put it in your cups or glasses, make it three or four hours before you use it.

  The
tradition of day-old cheese being transformed into a dessert—which is essentially what happens with junket—appears in many older European cultures as well. The Scots also made junket, which they called hattit kit, or “hatted kit.” This is not a reference to haberdashery, but an obsolete word for coagulation. Hattit kit is always made with buttermilk, and the original version was made on the farm. A pan of buttermilk was brought to the cow and warm new milk squirted in it to start the buttermilk curdling. Later on, rennet was used instead of buttermilk and thick cream instead of warm new milk.

  In this 1977 recipe from the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes, both techniques were combined. The cooks also pointed out that although the milk did not really have to be milked directly from the cow into the pan, that was still the best way to do it.

  Warm slightly over fire 2 pints of buttermilk. Pour it into a dish and carry it to the side of a cow. Milk it into about 1 pint of milk, having previously put into the dish sufficient rennet for the whole. After allowing it to stand for a while, lift the curd, place it on a sieve, and press the whey through until the curd is quite stiff. Season with sugar and nutmeg before serving, whip some thick cream, season it also with a little grated nutmeg and sugar and mix gently with the curd.

  In the Basque language, desserts made from cheese are called mamia. Or, in Spanish, cuajada, meaning curds. The Basque made these desserts with sheep’s milk because the Basques made everything with sheep’s milk. Their use of cows didn’t begin until modern times, and though cow’s milk is now sometimes used in making cheese, mamia is still made exclusively from sheep’s milk.

  The Basques heat the sheep’s milk with a small pinch of salt and bring it to a boil. Then the milk is removed from the heat, and when its temperature drops to about 85 degrees Fahrenheit, a teaspoon of rennet is added. Next it is stirred vigorously with a spatula and poured into cups. Traditionally, wooden cups were used, but today, small earthenware cups are preferred. It is left in a cool place to set (refrigeration can speed up the process), and after a day, it is ready to eat. Honey is poured on top. It is fresh and mild-tasting, with the sweet flavor of sheep’s milk.