Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Take big Swiss chard stalks and cut off their leaves and throw them away. Cut them the size of four fingers and wash them. Then boil them in salted water until done. Take them out of the water and spread them out on a woven tray until dried off. Put them in yogurt, which has been mixed with garlic, which has been boiled, and spread a little nigella [a black seed of an Asian flowering plant often called black cumin, though it is not related. Today its best-known use is in Armenian string cheese] and mint leaves on it.

  Salt fish and yogurt, Samak malih bi-laban, from the same book, is a perfect desert meal:

  Take salted fish, wash it, cut it up medium and fry it. Then take it from the pan hot and put it in yogurt and garlic. You throw nigella and finely milled Chinese cinnamon on its surface, and it is eaten hot or cold.

  Another use of yogurt popular in the Arab empire was kamakh rijal, which was yogurt and salt left to bake in the sun. This was often an urban dish made on household rooftops. It ages like cheese and after about a month, even develops a cheeselike smell. Protected from decay by its salt, it continues aging for months. Fresh milk is mixed in daily, and it ends up resembling a soft salty cheese. It has a sharp flavor, especially when made, as recommended, with sheep’s milk.

  Arabs did also cook with fresh milk, often together with rice. This recipe is from the thirteenth-century Baghdad cookbook:

  RUKAMIYAH [ROUGHLY TRANSLATED AS “WHITENESS”]

  Cook rice with milk until set thick, then ladle out. Place on top of this, meat fried in tail-fat and seasoning in the form of kebabs. Sprinkle with cinnamon.

  Arab dishes with fresh milk as the central ingredient were rare, but there were a few, such as this one from The Description of Familiar Food called rukhamiyya, or “marbling.” It uses sugar; the Arabs were the first to use sugar.

  A quart of rice, three pounds of milk, a race [root] of ginger, a stick of Ceylon cinnamon, the weight of a quarter dirham [the monetary unit] of mastic. Then you take half of that milk—that is, a pound and a half—and you put it in the pot, and you put the Ceylon cinnamon, ginger, and mastic with it. When the water and the bulk boil [“water” may be a mistake, since there is no other mention of it] you wash the rice and put it in the pot, moistening it with the pound and a half of milk that remains, little by little, on a gentle fire. Then you moisten it awhile, and you stir it awhile, and you continue moistening it and stirring it little by little on a nice fire. If all that is on a fire of coals, best of all. And when it smells good you leave it hanging overnight in smoke. And when something of the dish tastes smoky to you, take a bunch of leeks, cut off their ends and tie them and arrange them in the pot while it is hanging in the smoke. When you ladle it out, ladle it with sesame oil and sprinkle it with sugar.

  6

  THE DAYS OF MILK AND BEER

  Medieval Europeans counted on dairy products—they were central to their diet—especially cheese. Milk was also used, occasionally for drinking but much more commonly in cooking.

  In the fourteenth century, Guillaume Tirel, more often known as Taillevent, the chief cook for Charles V of France, wrote a cookbook that is considered to be the founding document of French haute cuisine, French cooking for the upper class. Milk is not a leading ingredient in his recipes, but it does show up from time to time, often in unexpected ways.

  Taillevent avoided mixing milk with fish. This was a medieval taboo, though it was not always strictly adhered to. Jews were more concerned about mixing meat and dairy. The Dutch, irrepressible dairy consumers, ate herring with sour cream. But as far as we know, Taillevent and his royal patrons never combined fish and dairy, and in medieval Europe in general there are few recipes to be found with this combination. An uneasiness about it persists, though there is little reason for it. In Italy today it is a major gastronomic faux pas to put grated cheese on pasta that contains seafood.

  Taillevent made a dish made with milk curds and lardons, which are pieces of smoked pork breast, as opposed to American bacon, which comes from the belly. The dish was not a Taillevent original; a similar dish was found in an earlier German manuscript. But this recipe is unusual in that it offers the cook the option of using fish instead of bacon, thus breaking the fish-dairy taboo. When the dish was made without meat, it could be served on holy days.

  LARDED MILK

  Boil milk on the fire, beat some egg yolks, and put the milk over a fire with a small amount of charcoal [low heat] and add the eggs. Those who want meat [i.e., if it is not a holy day], cut two or three pieces of lardon and put it with the milk, or if you want to add fish, there is no need to use lardons, but add wine and verjus [the very tart juice of unripe grapes, popular in medieval cooking] for the purpose of curdling, then remove from the fire and drain it on a white cloth and fold it and squeeze it. Put it on a table to drain for three days with some clove buds and fry until it gets some color and toss sugar on top.

  Taillevent also gave this milk recipe:

  PROVENÇAL MILK

  In a sauce pan scald cow milk. Beat egg yolks off the fire and while doing this slowly add about a quarter cup of hot milk into the eggs and stir the mixture into the remaining milk. Cook this until the sauce is thick. Poach eggs in water and gently add them to sauce. Put them in bowls and serve with toast.

  The influence of Taillevent’s recipes can be seen in later works such as the 1393 guide for bourgeois households, Le Ménagier de Paris. Some of these variations of his recipes could be seen as improvements. For example, Le Ménagier added ginger and saffron to the Provençal milk recipe.

  Fourteenth-century France also had a kind of milk sauce for poultry. Called dodine, it was made from the drippings of a roast. Like porridge before it and pudding after it, dodines were not originally made with milk. This dodine for capon and lamprey, by Chiquart, a Savoyard court chef in 1420, uses cheese. The recipe also shows that Brie, the famous soft cheese dating back to at least the eighth century, was a well-established food by the fifteenth century. The Crampone cheese mentioned comes from the Auvergne and is similar to Gruyère:

  When your capons are off the spit, get a good pot that is very clean and get a good strainer and strain into the pot what you have collected in the silver dish or pan from the capon and lampreys, and if you see that there is not enough broth to make the Dodine, draw it out with your good beef bouillon. Get white ginger and a few grains of paradise [sometimes called melegueta pepper, a peppery seed] and flavor it with verjuice, though not too much, and with salt, too. Get good parsley, chop off its leaves; get your table bread and cut good slices for toasting; get very good Crampone cheese or Brie cheese, or the best cheese that can be had; of the slices of toast cut each into three strips, then set them out on your dishes, with cheese over them, and then your broth over top of that. When they go to the dresser those sops are served up [that is, the slices of bread with sauce and cheese are put on a plate] and in another dish put the Pilgrim Capons.

  An even earlier dodine from Le Grand Cuisinier de Toute Cuisine by an unknown author in the mid-fourteenth century takes a yet bolder turn:

  WHITE DODINE

  Take some good cow’s milk. Put it to cook in a frying pan beneath your roast with some white powder [sweet spices], two or three egg yolks: strain your milk and let it cook all together with a little sugar some salt and a little bit of parsley leaves. If you want, put in some minced marjoram. Place your roasted waterfowl on top.

  Something was beginning here—an early use of sugar in Europe. Before this, there were a few sweet dishes made with honey, but desserts in the form of sweet dishes served at the end of the meal were not a widespread practice.

  In fourteenth-century France and England, there was a growing tendency to combine milk with sugar. By the sixteenth century, sugar, which had been a luxury for the rich, started to become more affordable and available. This was especially true after 1493, when Columbus brought sugar to the Caribbean and unleashed one of the greatest crimes of human history: the African slave trade, which made sugar inexpensive.
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br />   A pie was often a savory, not a sweet, dish. The unidentified A.W. who wrote A Book of Cookrye, originally published in London in 1584, offered recipes for mutton, chicken, calf’s-foot, and veal pies. Even his cheese tart was unsweetened. But by then, cheese tarts were a very old recipe. Taillevent had offered one more than two centuries earlier. This is A.W.’s recipe:

  TO MAKE A TARTE OF CHEESE

  Take good fine paste and drive [roll] it as thin as you can. Then take cheese, pare it, mince it, and braye [mash] it in a morter with the yolks of Egs til it be like paste, then put it in a faire dish with clarified butter, and then put it abroade into your paste and cover it with a faire cut cover, and so bake it: that doon, serve it forth.

  The unidentified A.W. also gave recipes for fruit pies—quince, apple, strawberry, and more. Fruit was one of the first desserts, followed by baked and sugared fruit. Sweet pies were well under way in the sixteenth century.

  A.W. also gave a recipe for a sweetened cream tart. This was a newer kind of cooking. There had been sweetened dairy before—such as honey and yogurt foods and syllabubs—but not dairy desserts of this kind: pies, puddings, custards, and creams made from sugar and eggs. Here is A.W.’s cream tart:

  TO MAKE A TART OF CREAM

  Take Creame and Egs and stir them, together, and put them into a strainer till the whey be come out, then strain it that it may be thick, season it with Ginger, Sugar, and a little Saffron, and then make your paste with flower [sic], and dry your paste in the Oven, and then fill it, and set it into the Oven to dry, and then take it out, and cast Sugar on it, and so serve it forth.

  Medieval Europeans were always cautious about milk. The debate over which animals produced the most healthful milk had continued. Taillevent often specified using cow’s milk, while Le Ménagier de Paris cautioned that the ill and convalescent should avoid it. The best milk, it asserted, was human milk, followed by donkey’s milk, sheep’s milk, and goat’s milk. But the Normans, who ruled England after 1066, did not like goat’s milk.

  Curiously, although most Europeans rated donkey’s milk very highly, they had no interest in mare’s milk, which has similar qualities. Europeans had horses, but left their colts to suckle on their mares. They knew that Asians used mare’s milk. Homer had mentioned it, calling Scythians “mare milkers,” and Herodotus wrote of the custom of drinking it in Central Asia. But, as often happened when he wrote about foreign customs, he did not make it sound good. It starts well, when he describes them skimming the cream off mare’s milk to enjoy it as a particular treat. But then he writes about how a blind slave would stick a blowpipe made from a hollowed bone into a mare’s genitalia and blow to expand the udder, while another slave did the milking.

  Early Europeans who traveled to Mongolia had nothing good to say about the culture and milk there. They considered the Mongols the epitome of barbarism. In 1246, Friar John of Pian de Carpine visited the Mongol court and called the Mongols a detestable nation of Satan. He described their barbarous slaughter of people, villages, and gardens as they went “swarming over the earth like locusts” and said they drank blood. He even found their large horses barbaric. As for prisoners, he said, they were enslaved and horribly mistreated. He wrote, “They have misused their captives as they have misused their mares.” If Mongols drank mare’s milk, then drinking mare’s milk was barbaric.

  William of Rubruck, a Franciscan from Florence who traveled to Mongolia in 1254–1256, also had nothing good to say about the Mongols. He described an encampment of chieftains who kept their horses near their tents. The chiefs had a long meeting, “and there they remained until noon, when they began drinking mare’s milk till evening so plentifully that it was a rare sight.” Even those Europeans who regarded dairy as central to their diet would never spend an entire day guzzling milk. That scale of milk consumption was unimaginable to a European.

  Rubruck quickly realized that the Mongols lived in a milk-based society of a level he had never seen before. Felt representations of udders hung over the entranceways of their tents. The mares were large and often uncooperative and had to be milked five or more times a day to produce only about two liters per horse—a very small quantity for so large an animal. He described the milking of the mares thus:

  They stretch a long rope on the ground fixed to two stakes stuck in the ground, and to this rope they tie toward the third hour to the rope the colts of the mares they want to milk. Then the mothers stand near their foals and allow themselves to be quietly milked, and if one be too wild, then a man takes the colt and brings it to her, allowing it to suck a little, then he takes it away and the milker takes its place.

  Because the mares were so difficult to milk, milking was men’s work, in contrast to most cultures, where women milked the cows.

  William of Rubruck also witnessed how the Mongols made powdered milk. He wrote that they “boiled [the milk] down until it was perfectly dry and would keep for very long times without salting.”

  Fresh mare’s milk is a strong laxative and is generally regarded as undrinkable. Rubruck described how some of this milk was made into butter by putting it in a skin and churning with a hollow stick that he said was the size of a human head on one end. The Mongols drank the tart liquid that was left over, which must have been buttermilk.

  Rubruck also described two products whose manufacture is based on the fact that mare’s milk does not curdle. This, too, would be its disadvantage to Europeans, because you cannot make cheese from it. But that is also true of donkey’s milk, which Europeans favored, though they made very little. The Mongols would churn the mare’s milk until its thicker part sank to the bottom. The bottom part was very white and was given to slaves. The top part was a clear liquid—whey—and was given to lords. The clear whey drink was fermented, and both Rubruck and Marco Polo drank it, enjoying the slight intoxication that resulted, though Rubruck said he had to first get over the shock of its tartness. It made him break out in a sweat, and it “brings on urination,” he wrote.

  The intoxicating drink, known as koumiss, was kept in a huge skin bucket in a family’s tent. Each time someone entered, they gave a stir to the koumiss to help with fermentation. Rubruck also witnessed the Mongols’ annual festival of May 9, which celebrates the first koumiss of the new year. A few drops of koumiss are sprinkled on the ground and all the white horses in the herds blessed.

  Koumiss was a basic part of the Mongol diet, especially after the late sixteenth century, when the Mongols converted to Tibetan Buddhism and the eating of fish and horsemeat was banned. The success of the Mongol conquest of most of Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in the largest empire in history until the twentieth-century British Empire, was basically achieved by mounted soldiers who could ride for long hours without stopping to eat or rest. They drew their sustenance from the koumiss, dried cow’s-milk curds, and powdered milk that they carried.

  Powdered milk, a common commodity today, was a curiosity for thirteenth-century Europeans. Marco Polo wrote:

  They also have milk dried into a kind of paste to carry with them; and when they need food they put it in water and heat it up until it dissolves and then they drink it. It is prepared in this way; they boil the water and when the rich part floats on the top, they skim it into another vessel, and of that they make butter, for the milk will not become solid until this is removed. Then they put the milk in the sun to dry. And when they go on an expedition, every man takes some ten pounds of this dried milk with him, and of a morning he will take half a pound of it and put it in his leather bottle, with as much water as he pleases. So as he rides along, the milk paste and water get well churned together into a kind of pap [that word was later used for milk-based baby formula] and that makes his dinner.

  All Mongol males, no matter how high their rank, were required to give mares to the emperor so that he could provide himself and his family with dairy products. It was a horse culture back then and it still is today. Many men work and travel on horseback. Even signalmen holding up their ba
tons beside train tracks are mounted. And they still drink koumiss.

  At the end of the thirteenth century, after William of Rubruck but before Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo visited the Mongols. He wrote about Mongols drinking koumiss, about Kublai Khan’s passion for it, and about how the ruler maintained a special herd of white mares as a private milk source. In fact, Marco Polo had a lot to say about milk, which is interesting, because despite his reputation for introducing many European food trends, he was really not much of a food writer. He completely missed the existence of tea, which later became so popular in England and Europe, and the well-known story of his introduction of pasta to Italy is completely apocryphal—as can be seen by the early Roman tracta recipes and the early Italian and Arab pasta recipes. But, like William of Rubruck, he seemed taken with koumiss.

  Ibn Battuta made out better with the Mongols than he did later in Mali. Their chief sent him several sheep, a horse, and a large bag of koumiss.

  With good reason, Europeans were uneasy about drinking fresh milk. A Catalan health code written in 1307 in Montpellier, Regiment de Sanitat, Rules for Health, by Arnau de Vilanova, a widely recognized medieval doctor, warned about milk, “You must consume it immediately after producing it and it should not have a strange taste or a bad smell. Then it is all right to drink a quarter of a liter.” The twelfth-century English writer Alexander Neckam wrote, “Raw cream undecocted eaten with strawberries … is a rural man’s banquet. I have known such banquets have put men in jeopardy of their lives.” It was often advised that after drinking milk, the mouth should be flushed with honey to be rid of the harmful effects of the milk. It could be seen that people became sick and even died from milk even though no one understood why. Many would not take the risk of fresh milk, but indeed it is surprising that anyone would.

  Milk was a bodily fluid, like blood, many believing it was blood, and in the Catholic Church it was under the same interdictions as red meat. No dairy product could be consumed on holy days. The number of these days steadily rose until the seventh century and then remained in place for the remainder of the Middle Ages. These days included Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and the forty days before Easter. In all, for considerably more than half the days of the year, dairy, along with red meat, could not be eaten.