Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Parmesan became renowned after 1357, when Giovanni Boccaccio, a Florentine writer, in his celebrated book of stories, Decameron, wrote a fantasy about a mountain of grated Parmesan where “dwell folk that do ought else but make macaroni and ravioli.” The writer set this fanciful mountain far from Italy “in the land of the Basques.” But no doubt he would not have made such a reference unless the cheese was already well known in southern Europe.

  Parmesan cheese was also called Parmigiano-Reggiano, because it was, and still is, made in the rich green pastureland between Parma and Reggio. Watered by the Po River, it is Italy’s great cow region, Emilia Romagna. If you see a pasta dish made with butter, it probably comes from Emilia Romagna, the one region in Italy that uses butter rather than olive oil.

  To make Parmesan cheese, the cheesemaker left late-afternoon milk overnight. Then, in the morning, he skimmed the milk and made butter with the cream, while mixing the leftover skim milk with the fresh milk brought in from the morning milking. Then rennet and some whey from the cheesemaking done the day before were added. The mixture was heated to a low temperature for forty minutes, at which point it was curdled and the whey removed. The excess whey was fed to local pigs, which produced Italy’s most famous ham, prosciutto di Parma. To bear that name even today, the ham must come from a pig that is fed Parmesan whey.

  Parmesan was made into very large wheels and aged for two or three years. Its fame endured. Two centuries after Boccaccio wrote of a mountain made of grated Parmesan, the Renaissance food writer Platina singled the cheese out for its quality. Samuel Pepys claimed that he had saved his supply from the London fire by burying it in his backyard. Thomas Jefferson had Parmesan cheese shipped to him in Virginia.

  By Jefferson’s time, it was not unusual to import Parmesan from Italy. William Verrall, an eighteenth-century chef in Lewes, Sussex, England, in his 1759 cookbook gave this recipe for what in time would be known as macaroni and cheese. Verrall had studied under a French chef and apparently learned about Parmesan from the French without knowing much about Italian food. He explained in a recipe previous to this one, for “macaroons in cream”—a devastatingly rich dish of sugar, egg yolks, cream, and butter—that these macaroons are not “the sweet biscuit sort but a foreign paste, the same as vermicelli, but made very large in comparison to that.”

  MACAROONS WITH PARMESAN CHEESE

  For this too you must boil them in water first, with a little salt, pour to them a ladle of cullis [broth], a morsel of green onion and parsley minced fine, pepper salt and nutmeg: stew all a few minutes, and pour into a dish with a rim as before, squeeze a lemon or orange, and cover it over pretty thick with Parmesan cheese grated very fine, bake it to a fine colour about as long a time as the last [quarter of an hour], and serve it up hot.

  The French serve to their tables a great many dishes with this sort of cheese, and in the same manner, only sometimes with a savoury white sauce, such as scallops, oysters, and many of the things you have among these entremets.

  Another internationally famous cow’s-milk cheese is cheddar, originally from the town of Cheddar in pasture-rich Somerset, England. Unlike Parmesan, however, the place of origin of cheddar cheese has never been legally guaranteed. It is not nearly as old as Parmesan, though it dates back to at least the sixteenth century and probably earlier. The word “cheddar” originally referred to the town, but soon came to mean the cheesemaking process. “Cheddaring” means slicing partially strained curd, stacking it, and then turning and restacking it every ten minutes during the pressing process. This makes cheddar an unusually smooth cheese.

  “Cutting up curd,” The Illustrated London News, November 4, 1876.

  Like Parmesan, cheddar cheeses are very large cheeses, though few are as large as the nine-foot-diameter, 1,250-pound cheddar made for Queen Victoria’s wedding. In Somerset, cheddars were called “corporation” cheeses because it would take the milk of an entire parish of farms to make one cheddar. The Queen’s cheddar took two parishes. The cheese also needed to age between one and two years, so making these large cheeses was a real investment of time and money. Smaller cheddar cheeses, known as truckles, were sold locally, but the big cheeses were designed to travel. The idea of cheddar was also exported and the cheese was made in most British colonies. There are Irish, Canadian, American, and Australian cheddars, but rarely do any of these have the distinctive “nutty” flavor of a Somerset cheddar. Few seem to notice.

  Eliza Smith’s book included a recipe for making cheddar, contributing to the idea that it could be made anywhere, although clearly you would have to be on a farm to do so. Cheesemakers may have started thinking in commercial terms, but cheesemaking was still usually a family activity, and cookbooks of the seventeenth and even eighteenth century often included various cheese recipes. Smith’s book, which was intended for housewives, gives recipes for making rennet, butter, and several kinds of cheese.

  TO MAKE A CHEDDAR CHEESE

  Take the new milk of twelve cows in the morning, and the evening cream of twelve cows, putting to it three spoonfuls of rennet: when it is come, break it and whey it [drain it]; that being done break it again, that being done work into the curd three pounds of fresh butter, put it in your press, turn it very often for an hour or more, and change the cloths, washing them every time you change them, you may put wet cloths at first to them, but toward the last put two or three dry cloths, let it lie thirty or forty hours in the press, according to the thickness of the cheese, then take it out, wash it in whey, and lay it in a dry cloth until it is dry, then lay it on your shelf and turn it often.

  The great dairy consumers lived in northern Europe and in the Alps, especially Switzerland. Despite the fall of Rome, southern Europe had never lost its sense of superiority over its neighbors and still considered them to be milk-swilling barbarians. Southerners did drink milk and certainly ate cheese, but never on the same scale as the northerners. The Dutch in particular were singled out as a crude and comic people endlessly engorged on milk, butter, and cheese. Even the Flemish laughed at them, calling them kaaskoppen, “cheese heads.” Northerners, too, especially the English, belittled the Dutch for their dairy habits. One English pamphlet said, “A Dutchman is a lusty, fat, two legged cheese-worm.”

  More than mere cheese heads, the medieval Dutch were also great porridge heads, enthusiastically consuming quantities of a very pleasant variation of what the French and English were calling frumentum, a Latin word for “wheat.” Typically, the Dutch ate porridge at least once a day. It could be eaten at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and as an appetizer, main course, or dessert.

  “Milking Time” engraving by John Godfrey from the Art Journal of 1856, from a 1649 painting by Paulus Potter.

  A 1560 book, Nyuwen Coock Boek, gave this recipe for Dutch porridge, which seems well worth copying:

  Boil hulled grains of wheat in water and drain them. Next, boil plain milk with egg yolks, sugar, and saffron. Add grains of wheat and let them boil for a while.

  Boiling with egg yolks was a popular Dutch technique for curdling milk. Porridge was becoming less a cereal and more a sweetened custard or pudding.

  In addition to milk, cheese, and porridge, the Dutch ate huge quantities of butter. The upper classes would pride themselves on setting their tables with several types of butter, perhaps one from Delft, one from Gouda, and others. The Dutch preferred cooking with butter to cooking with lard as other northerners did. They also enjoyed whey or buttermilk with breakfast. Even in the poorhouses, breakfast was buttermilk and bread.

  And what was a Dutch meal without butter? Butter was used wherever possible. Even hutsepot, a traditional meat stew, used butter. This is a 1652 recipe offered by a doctor, Jan van Beverwijck from Dordecht:

  Take some mutton or beef, wash it clean and chop it fine. Add there to some green stuff or parsnips or some stuffed prunes and the juice of lemons or oranges or citron [resembles a lemon but much larger, usually only the peel is eaten], or a pint of strong, clear vinegar, m
ix these together, set the pot on a slow fire; add some ginger and melted butter and you shall have prepared a fine hutsepot.

  You would probably need to cook the hutsepot for about four hours.

  The Dutch navy, which in the sixteenth century was becoming a formidable force, issued to each sailor a weekly ration of half a pound of cheese, half a pound of butter, and a five-pound loaf of bread. The historian Simon Schama calculated that a Dutch ship with a crew of one hundred in 1636 would need among their provisions 450 pounds of cheese and one and a quarter tons of butter. An ample supply of cheese and butter were the right of every Dutchman.

  The French told “Flemish jokes” as they do “frites jokes” today, but rather than ridiculing them for their fried potatoes, they laughed at them and the Dutch for the extent of their butter consumption. Foreign mockery aside, Dutch health authorities constantly complained that the Dutch ate unhealthful quantities of butter. Particularly disturbing to many was the Dutch habit of eating butter and cheese together. In the mid-seventeenth century, the painter Paulus Potter wrote:

  Cheese with butter is an evil

  Wished upon us by the Devil

  But mostly the Dutch did believe that dairy food was an essential part of a good diet. The seventeenth-century doctor Heijman Jacobs advised consuming “Sweet [fresh] milk, fresh bread, good mutton and beef, fresh butter and cheese.” Artists from the celebrated Dutch school of still-life painting often included cheeses in their compositions.

  The Dutch made numerous types of cheese—some with sheep’s milk, but more with cow’s. They even made a cheese from colostrum, caseum nymolken. They made a new spring cheese, a cheese with cumin, and cottage cheese, which is curds with a small amount of whey left in. They also made imitations of English cheese, French Brie, and Parmesan. In the sixteenth century they started making Italian-style ricotta.

  The Dutch had an effective distribution system for cheese, with numerous urban centers featuring cheese markets. It was a small country, and most people lived on or near a farm or near a cheese market. Gouda cheese (pronounced how-da in Dutch, with a guttural h like the Spanish letter jota, which is where it comes from) was named after the town in whose cheese market it was sold. The earliest record of this cheese was in 1184, and as is usually true of first records, the cheese had probably already been made for some time before this date. Dutch cheesemaking itself certainly goes back long before this. When the Romans first came to the Dutch lands in 57 B.C.E., according to Julius Caesar, they found a cheese-eating people. The Dutch word for cheese, kaas, comes from the Latin caseus, which has led some historians to conclude that the locals learned to make hard cheese from the Romans; the Roman soldiers had hard cheese rations for marching.

  Gouda is an aged cow’s-milk cheese, and like many cheeses, it was always made by women at the farmhouse, despite requiring the hard manual labor of stirring and cutting curd in huge vats. The milk was brought in still warm from the two daily milkings and was curdled not only with calves’ rennet, but also with lactic acid bacteria cultured by the cheesemaker.

  Though most Gouda today is made in highly industrialized factories, there are a few farms that make it much the same way it was made in the twelfth century, with raw milk fresh from the cow. This cheese is labeled boerenkaas, farm cheese, and it is collected from the farms by wholesalers.

  The Dutch began exporting cheese in the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century, they had such a surplus that they were exporting it to England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, and Portugal.

  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Dutch became skilled at reclaiming land from the sea by building dykes and creating polders, drained patches of reclaimed seabed. This led to dramatic improvements in cattle breeding and land maintenance. A great portent for the future was the fact that in the northwest, just below the North Sea in the province of Friesland, the only part of Holland to have its own language, farmers were having tremendous success crossbreeding livestock to develop cows that produced more milk.

  The cheese market at Hoorn, a town in North Holland, from an 1880 issue of La Tour du Monde, a popular French travel weekly. The artist, Ferdinandus, was a popular illustrator for the magazine.

  Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the value of a Dutch cow quadrupled. The Dutch were starting to understand what best to feed cattle, as well as how best to cultivate pastureland. This led to an enormous increase in milk production in Friesland, Flanders, and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch cows were producing more than twice the yield of cows in neighboring countries, and milk was more plentiful in the Netherlands than in most of Europe.

  Though at first unnoticed, a huge shift was taking place in the European perception of the Dutch. Their country, which had broken off from Spanish rule in the 1590s, was rapidly shifting from a former lowly possession of the Holy Roman Empire to an independent republic displaying a genius in art, science, and engineering. Seemingly overnight, the Netherlands was becoming a global trading empire and the leading maritime and economic power of the world. Suddenly, the cheese heads were considered brilliant.

  All over Europe there were discussions and writings about what made the Dutch such geniuses. And those having these discussions often freely admitted that they had once thought of the Dutch as idiots who just drank milk and ate cheese. The Europeans had also started recognizing that there was genius in the Dutch dairy farms—in their better pastures, better cows, and ability to farm below-sea-level land. Dutch dairying, too, was now considered brilliant.

  An even bigger shift in the dairy world was also taking place. The Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, milk drinkers all, driven by unabashed greed and a sense of adventure, were undertaking long-distance sea voyages to faraway lands—two vast continents—where humans did not milk animals.

  8

  TO MAKE PUDDING

  There were no cows or cattle of any kind in America until the Europeans brought them. There were a number of breeds of goats and sheep, but no one milked them. No one tried to domesticate or milk the bison of North America either. The camel-like llama of South America produces excellent milk and is easily farmed, but they were never milked, even though they lived near the Incas, a great and advanced civilization. Llamas were domesticated, but used only for carrying, while a smaller breed, alpacas, was used for its wool. But from the Arctic Brooks Range of Alaska to the Antarctic tip of Patagonia, there was no dairying. Most people were lactose-intolerant.

  In the Americas, humans, like all other mammals, provided their own milk to their young. In fact, in some cases when milk was needed for the survival of a nonhuman animal, women provided it. This has been documented among some Canadian tribes, and the Puma of the Sioux nation, and some Amazonian tribes. But it is not unique to the Americas. It had sometimes occurred in Europe and Asia, including ancient Rome as well. There are also records of women in the highlands of New Guinea breastfeeding piglets, pre-European Hawaiians breastfeeding puppies, and Guyanese women breastfeeding deer in South America. Women breastfed animals whose survival was important to them, and also to stimulate lactation and relieve engorged breasts.

  Soon after Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought over cows. They were not going to live without milk, and there was no real debate about what kind of milking animal to bring, because if you are going to bring milk producers over on long ocean voyages, it is logical to bring the animal that produced the most milk per head.

  The different European nationalities that came to the Americas had two things in common: They all ate beef and dairy products, and they all wanted to make life in the new land resemble life in the old land as closely as possible. This is in large part why they tended to view the people and cultures living in the Americas as simply being in the way. They did learn to eat some local products, such as corn and turkey, but mostly transported European food over as quickly as possible.

  On Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the
Americas, he brought cattle to Santo Domingo, which is now the Dominican Republic. They did not resemble European breeds and are thought to have descended from Indian stock. Cows from India had probably been brought by the Arabs to Spain, where they were interbred with European stock. In 1525 the Spanish brought cattle to the Mexican Caribbean port of Vera Cruz. The animals eventually spread throughout Mexico and are thought to be the origin of the Texas Longhorn. The Spanish also brought cattle from the Canary Islands to South America. Some sheep and goats were brought over, too.

  Cows were not an overnight success. They were attacked by mosquitoes, killed by warring tribesmen, and slaughtered by starving farmers for their beef. Dairying struggled for more than a century before becoming central to the South American diet. Eventually, though, missionaries on the west coast of the continent were able to live off the milk and vegetables they produced, and they taught the native women to make cheese and butter.

  The first cattle in North America were brought to Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, also by the Spanish. The British brought their first cows to a new colony on Roanoke Island in 1580, but the colony, cows and all, disappeared. When the British founded their second Virginia colony, Jamestown, in 1606, three ships brought over 140 colonists, but no cows. Ships supplied the colonists with cheese and butter for a time, despite a British law prohibiting the export of butter, and then, just as the colony was dying out in 1610, Lord Delaware sailed up the Chesapeake and saved it with more men, provisions, and milking cows.

  Lord Delaware believed that the Jamestown colony had to develop dairy farms if it were to survive. When he returned to England in 1611, he wrote a report to the Virginia Company, explaining that “the Cattell [cattle] already there are much increased, and thrive exceedingly with the pasture of the country, the kine [cows] all this past winter, though the ground was covered most with snow, and the season sharp, lived without other feeding than the grass they found, with which they prospered well, and many of them readie to fall with Calve.”