Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1500 in the Norman city of Rouen, where one of France’s three great cathedrals stands, there was a shortage of cooking oil. So the archbishop gave his dioceses permission to use butter. Each local diocese that wanted to take advantage of the special dispensation had to pay a small fee to the church, and legend has it that one of the towers of the cathedral was built with this money. The so-called butter tower, erected in the early sixteenth century, was a late addition to the church, which was begun in the twelfth century.

  One of the few milk controversies that have vanished over time was whether milk was hot or cold. This was a subject of much debate in the Middle Ages, and it had nothing to do with temperature. Rather, it was a concept—and one that is still adhered to in China today. Some foods were regarded as “hot,” and some as “cold,” and since the body reacted differently to the two, good health depended on having an appropriate balance between them. Hot food caused sexual desire; red meat was a “hot” food, and this was the original reason why it was banned on holy days.

  Which foods were hot and which were cold was generally straightforward. Red meat was hot; fish and anything that lived in the water was cold. Thus, whale meat was considered a cold red meat. A beaver was hot, but its tail was cold, as a beaver sits on a log with its tail in the water. And so dishes made of beaver tail or whale meat were appropriate on holy days, which led to the near total destruction of European whale pods.

  Milk was a more complicated matter. Some thought it was hot, others found it cold, and still others classified it in a special category, “warm.” For many who regarded milk as whitened blood, milk was simply hot, like red blood. But some, including Galen, argued that when blood turned into milk, it lost its heat. Galen even said that it was dangerously cold. Those who argued that milk was warm complicated matters by saying that the various products made from it might be hot or cold. Advocates of milk being warm or hot also argued that the very young and very old are cold and therefore milk was good for them, whereas for the average adult, milk was risky. And for those who were weak or sick or even melancholy, milk was ill-advised.

  Nor was animal milk recommended for babies in medieval Europe. As in the ancient world, it was recognized that some women couldn’t or wouldn’t breastfeed, and for them the remedy almost always was wet nurses. A twelfth-century English text said, “The women of our own race quickly wean even those who they love, and if they are of the richer classes they actually scorn to suckle them.” An English text by Bernard of Gordon in the fourteenth century recommended wet nurses because “Women nowadays are too delicate or too haughty, or they do not like the inconvenience.”

  Originally, the baby was taken to the wet nurse to be fed, but starting in the eleventh century, the nursemaid became a live-in domestic. She was usually better paid than other household servants. Often the mother alternated with the wet nurse so that she would have milk in the event that something happened to the nursemaid.

  At first, only upper-class women used wet nurses, but as a middle class of shopkeepers emerged, especially in Italy, they too hired them, and different “authorities” in different countries had varying concepts of who would make the ideal nursemaid. A very popular English medical text from the first decade of the fourteenth century, Rosa Medicinae, by the contemporary doctor John of Gaddesden, but packed with advice from greats of the past—including Galen, Avicenna, and Averroes—recommended “a brunette with her first child, which should be a boy.” Gaddesden also recommended that those suffering from what was called phythisis, tuberculosis, feed either from a wet nurse or directly from an animal’s udder. This treatment for tuberculosis continued for centuries; ironically, it was not yet known that bovine tuberculosis can be transmitted from infected cows through their milk.

  Bottle-feeding was not popular in medieval Europe, largely because it was believed that a baby nursed on animal milk would grow up to be less intelligent than one raised on human milk. But wet nurses also had their drawbacks. They were not always honest, and some were secretly heavy drinkers. Others sometimes supplemented their diminishing milk supply with goat’s milk.

  Many Europeans extended the belief that a baby takes on the characteristics of its wet nurse to a belief that a baby who suckles on animals will become wild and animal-like. For example, it was thought that a baby who suckled on a goat would become very sure-footed.

  The medical historian Valerie Fildes suggests that the fact that the French were not particularly drawn to such beliefs explains why the practice of babies suckling on animals was more common in France. The philosopher and writer Michel de Montaigne observed in 1580 from his native Dordogne in southwest France, “It is common around here to see women in the village, when they cannot feed the children at their breast, call the goats to their rescue.”

  Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist, told a story in 1667 about Dr. Cayus, or Caius, a leading figure in one of Cambridge University’s prominent colleges: the scholar was very old and lived entirely on women’s breast milk. Dr. Thomas Moffet gave a similar account in his 1655 book Health Improvement and said that Cayus sucked the milk directly from a nursemaid’s breasts. At first, apparently, his wet nurse was notably ill-tempered, and so was he, but then he switched to a better-natured wet nurse and became better-natured himself. It was not unusual in Europe for the sick and aged to be fed human breast milk.

  Artificial feeding was rare. Many historians believe that this decision was often made with great pressure from the women’s husbands. In fact, the entire breastfeeding issue was an early version of the modern abortion issue, with men trying to make the decisions about what women should do with their bodies.

  Taillevent made a sauce called jance from cow’s milk. He did not specify how it was to be used, but jance was a popular sauce throughout medieval Europe, often served with poultry. There are many variations, and the only thing that they all have in common is the dominant taste of ginger. The word “jance” is thought to come from the word “ginger,” which was one of the most valued products of the spice trade, largely controlled by the Portuguese. This is Taillevent’s instructions for making milk jance:

  COW’S MILK JANCE

  Crush ginger, beat egg yolks, boil cow’s milk, and mix them together.

  Such sauces predate Taillevent. An anonymous 1290 manuscript, Traité du XIIIe Siècle, suggests:

  The flesh of capons and hens is good roasted with a sauce of wine in the summer and in the winter, a sauce flavored with garlic and cinnamon and ginger, mixed with almond [milk] or ewe’s milk.

  This, in fact, was a sheep’s-milk jance. Almost all the surviving recipe collections from the period offered jance recipes, but they were usually made with cow’s milk. Ewe’s milk was an unusual touch.

  Given the risks of fresh milk, and the fact that it could not be used on the many holy days, substitutes had to be found. The most preferable was almond milk. That was why the anonymous recipe writer above gave jance makers a choice of using “almond or ewe’s milk”; the almond milk was for the holy days.

  Almond milk was made by grinding almonds to a fine powder, steeping the powder in boiled water, and then straining it. Recipes offering the option of using almond milk began appearing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but by the end of the sixteenth century, almond milk was already starting to disappear from European cooking. Why did it fall out of use? The risk of spoiled or bad milk certainly did not diminish. In fact, even as the British were dropping the use of almond milk at home, those living in Britain’s tropical colonies, most notably Jamaica, were learning to substitute coconut milk for dairy milk, making it much the same way as they did almond milk.

  One big factor in the move away from almond milk seems to have been the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants did not impose dietary restrictions for holy days, and as the restrictions faded away, so did the use of almond milk.

  There was also another factor. Animal milk had become more easily available. During the Middle Ages, there wer
e relatively few goats, sheep, and cows in Europe, and dairy farming was a small-scale family activity; it was not organized into a commercial enterprise until the eighteenth century. A farmer would have only two or three cows, or sometimes only one, and so did not have much milk to sell to others. Farmers were primarily interested in meat, and milk was a less important by-product. The purpose of keeping cows was that they bore calves. Cows were, to use the modern advertising label, grass-fed. But if you have only three cows, they do not need the extensive pastureland of a modern herd.

  The famous cheese of Somerset, which dates back to medieval times, was made from clover-fed cows. This clover was grown in the field where the cows grazed. It was better to be a cow in pasture-rich England or Holland than in snowy Sweden or Norway, which is one of the reasons why England and Holland became the leading dairy countries. But even in England, and even in Somerset, cows withered away to a pitiful state in winter. Some died. No one had extra milk to share.

  Furthermore, in medieval Europe and even considerably later, milk—which the English called “white meat”—was a seasonal food. As with all mammals, cows cannot lactate until they have offspring. That usually happened in the spring, and the cows could produce rich, plentiful milk through the spring and summer by eating fine warm-weather grasses. But in the winter, those grasses died away. In addition, a cow spent its first two years, about a third of its life, as a heifer, meaning that for a long period it didn’t produce any milk at all.

  Etching by Jean-Louis Demarne, 1752–1829. Milking a cow was one of many farm activities. (Author’s collection)

  To get the maximum value from a lactation, a cow was generally milked for ten months of the year. But this was also a matter of timing because a cow carries its young for about nine months, and there is usually a two-month drying-off period between its pregnancies. The farmer has to make adjustments to keep a cow birthing in the spring to take advantage of the good grass.

  Even cows whose lactation period stretched into winter did not produce much milk, so milk in abundance appeared only in the spring and summer. Fresh butter was available only in season, and only salted butter could be eaten the rest of the year. There was also something called “May butter,” spring butter that was left to cure unsalted; it was considered to be highly medicinal.

  The seasonal nature of milk gave it a special feeling—it was one of the glories of spring and summer. Unfortunately, though, it also meant that milk was produced in warm months, when it was most likely to spoil.

  Often, if a farmer lived near a city, and most did because it was an obvious advantage for a fast-spoiling product, he would take his cow into town to sell its milk. This was particularly common in London. The farmer would wander the streets, calling out, and women, either housewives or servants, would come out with buckets or other receptacles and he would milk the warm, foaming liquid directly into their containers. This had a number of advantages. The milk could not be fresher, and the customer could inspect the cow, to make sure it was healthy and well cared for.

  As London expanded, it established parks such as Hampstead Heath, originally a separate village, St. James’s Park, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields and allowed cows to graze in them. St. James’s Park had a reputation for high-quality milk, and affluent Londoners sent their staff there to collect it. But the move away from the door-to-door selling of fresh milk marked the beginning of what became a dangerous decline in the quality of urban milk. Women and milkmaids would milk the cows in the parks and carry two pailfuls hanging from a bar across their shoulders through the town. Soot, sticks, and other urban detritus might fall into these uncovered pails, and the washing of the pails between milkings was not common practice. Similarly, after dairies were established near towns and cities, milk was transported in uncovered pails or exposed panniers hung on donkeys. Some historians have noted a decline in the status of milk among urban people in the sixteenth century. Like the ancient Romans, they began to think of it as food for the poor, and it may have been the lack of hygiene surrounding milk—arriving in open vessels with twigs, bugs, and dirt floating on top—that was the reason for this distaste.

  Markham’s 1615 book for English housewives was the first English book that dealt with proper dairy management. He did emphasize cleanliness. But as often happens when men lectured women, the subject of hygiene got jumbled up with the urge to judge women:

  Touching the well ordering of milk after it has come home to the dairy, the main point belonging thereunto is the housewife’s cleanliness in the sweet and neat keeping of the dairy house; where not the least mot of any filth may by any means appear but all things either to the eye or nose so void of sourness or sluttishness, that a prince’s bed chamber may not exceed it.

  On the other hand, water was usually no cleaner than milk. The safest drink was beer. This may be why a number of northern cultures mixed milk and beer. It is an old idea in many northern countries. Milk and beer are the central ingredients in some early possets, and in several countries, including Holland and Scotland, oat porridge was commonly mixed with either ale or milk and often both. In what is today southern Sweden but used to be Denmark—the provinces of Skania, Halland, and Blekinge—beer and milk were commonly consumed at breakfast and most other meals. The beer was a type called small beer, meaning that it had a very low alcohol content. A mug of equal parts of small beer and milk, along with a slice or two of dark bread, was often a poor man’s meal. Beer and milk served with herring was also a common breakfast. The milk was sometimes fresh whole milk, sometimes skimmed milk, or sometimes even sour milk.

  The idea of milk mixed with ale has persisted. In 1875 John Henry Johnson of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a place with a milk history, requested a patent for a light alcohol beer made from whey, lactose, and hops. He never made the beer, but others did, or else made similar concoctions that they called milk stout. Eventually the only milk used in milk stout was lactose, and the British government, reasoning that this did not offer the health benefits people expected from milk, declared in 1946 that the word “milk” could no longer be used in the name.

  7

  THE CHEESE HEADS

  Fresh and young soft cheeses were popular with ancient Greeks and Romans and remained so in Europe. Originally they were almost always made of goat’s or sheep’s milk, but toward the end of the Middle Ages, there was a tendency to use cow’s milk. At first, such cheeses were made of pressed curds, with perhaps some local herbs added, and briefly aged. But in time, they became increasingly elaborate. This one is from Gervase Markham’s 1615 book:

  TO MAKE A FRESH CHEESE

  To make an excellent fresh cheese take a pottle [half gallon] of milk as it comes from the cow, and a pint of cream: then take a spoonful of rennet or earning and put it unto it, and let it stand two hours, then stir it up, put it into a fine cloth, and let the whey drain from it: then put it into a bowl and take the yolk of an egg, a spoonful of rose water, and beat them all together with a very little salt, with sugar and nutmegs, and when all these are brayed together and searced [completely blended], mix it with the curd, and then put it into a cheese vat with a very fine cloth.

  Cream cheese was also popular. Today we often eat cream cheese, but it is so industrialized that we have lost sight of what it is, or what it was. It dates back to at least the fifteenth century, and was very popular in numerous countries, including Scotland, England, and France. This is Eliza Smith’s 1727 cream cheese recipe from her book The Compleat Housewive, which was printed in eighteen editions, many of which appeared after her death. Smith’s book was the first cookbook printed in colonial America. Note that this recipe is called Summer Cream Cheese. That’s because summer was the time of year when you could get three pints of milk straight from the cow.

  TO MAKE SUMMER CREAM CHEESE

  Take three pints of milk just from the cow, and five pints of good sweet cream, which you must boil free from smoke, then put it into your milk, cool it till it is blood warm, and then put in a spoonful of r
ennet, when it is well come [set] take a large strainer, lay it upon a great cheese fat, then put the curd in gently upon the strainer, and when all the curd is in, lay on the cheese board, and a weight of two pounds: Let it so drain three hours, till the whey be well drained from it, then lay a cheese cloth in your lesser cheese fat, and put in the curd, laying the cloth smooth over as before, the board on the top of that, and a four pound weight on it, turn it every two hours into dry cloths before night and be careful not to break it next morning. Salt it in the fat until the next day, then put it into a wet cloth which you must shift every day till it is ripe.

  The switch from making sheep’s-milk or goat’s-milk cheese to making cow’s-milk cheese was in part because as cheesemakers became more commercial in outlook, they wanted to produce a cheese that could travel well and withstand some abuse. That meant hard, aged cow’s-milk cheese. Soldiers needed this kind of cheese as well. Detailed accounts remain of the provisions used by some of the soldiers in the first English Civil War, 1642–46. The two hundred men on the parliamentary side garrisoned in Wiltshire were provided with 5,300 pounds of cheese and 400 pounds of butter. The foot-soldier contingent received 16 pounds of cheese per day, along with 8 1/2 pounds of butter, 13 pounds of bread, and 40 pints of beer. Beer was deemed critical for maintaining stamina.

  Before long, one cheese began dominating the international cheese trade: Parmesan, which endures to this day. One of the earliest records of this cheese is from a ledger showing that some Parmesan was purchased by the commune of Florence in 1344. However, the cheese is thought to have begun much earlier than that.