Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  He went on to write, “Milke being a great nourishment and refreshing to our people serving as well for Physicke [health] as for food, so that it is in no way to be doubted, but when it shall please God that Sir Thomas Dale and Sir Thomas Gates shall arrive in Virginia with their extraordinary supply of one hundred Kine.”

  Thomas Dale, the new deputy governor of the colony of Virginia, had modern ideas about dairy farming. While today the progressive approach might be to grass-feed cows, in the early seventeenth century, it was unusually advanced to believe in using supplementary feed. Dale did believe that cows should be specially cared for in high-quality pastures, but he also thought they should have supplemental food and shelters. Dale built the first cow barn in the future United States. He also arranged for hay to be grown, harvested, and stored for winter food. He ruled by martial law and made the wanton killing of a cow a capital offense.

  But when Dale left the colony in 1616, leaving behind more than two hundred head of cattle, most of his ideas were abandoned. His cow barn was used for storage, and the cows no longer had either shelter or winter feed. Captain John Smith, a key figure in the colonization of both Virginia and New England, was better known for his exploits with women than for farming. He found the idea of feeding cows ridiculous and believed they should be left to forage.

  However, even without Dale, the Virginia Company did start to recognize the importance of dairy farming. A Virginia cow was priced at more than twice the price of a cow in England, and the company adopted a policy of shipping twenty heifers for every one hundred new settlers. By 1629 the colony had more than two thousand people and possibly as many as five thousand head of cattle. When Virginia became a democracy in 1619, they adopted laws against killing cows, one of Dale’s few surviving ideas. In 1673, during an unusually harsh winter, thousands of cows without shelter or feed died. Nonetheless, practices in the American dairy industry, though frequently argued about, did not change, and most cows had no shelter or supplemental feed until the nineteenth century. And the debate about feeding cows has continued.

  When the next group of English colonists settled in what the English called Northern Virginia, what John Smith labeled New England, and what local people called Massachusetts in 1620, it seems logical to assume that they would have learned something from the failures and successes of the Jamestown colony. But instead, they had to starve before learning the exact same things that the Virginia colonists had learned.

  The people who landed in Plymouth in 1620 were different from the ones who had settled in Virginia. They were religious extremists looking for a place to experiment with their ideas of theocracy. They cared little for details such as food supplies and so not only brought very little food with them, but also lacked skilled farmers and fishermen, nor did they bring the necessary farming and fishing equipment.

  Butter was one of the few foods with which they were amply supplied, at least initially—a hint of the standing of butter in early-seventeenth-century England. But apparently, William Bradford, the governor of the new colony, did not believe in the importance of butter, and when they found themselves short the necessary funds to leave England, he raised the difference by selling most of it off, calling it “a commodity they might best spare.”

  So the colonists paid their port duties and sailed off with scant food supplies and almost no knowledge of farming or fishing. One pilgrim wrote, “beseeching the Lord to give a blessing to our endeavore, and keep all our hearts in the bonds of peace and love, we take leave and rest.”

  They apparently did have at least some dairy provisions, however, because on November 26, two months and ten days after landing, sixteen men, well armed but with little food except for a provision of Dutch cheese, set out to explore Cape Cod.

  Even with some of the local Native Americans helping them, the settlers starved the first winter. Half of their 101 or 102 members died.

  With their remaining provisions, that March they entertained an Indian leader, Samoset, with biscuits, butter, cheese, and wild ducks. Samoset reportedly enjoyed the dairy products, which he had sampled before from English fishing ships. Finally, in March 1624, an English ship, the Charity, arrived with one bull and three heifers, and the New England dairy industry began. Subsequent ships brought more and more cattle of various breeds—black, red, and red-and-white. The black cows are thought to have been Kerry, a popular Irish breed descended from early Celtic cattle.

  In 1639 the first settlers arrived in Boston with thirty cows. More were brought in soon thereafter, and Boston developed a dairying culture. By 1650, butter and cheese were being exported from the New England colonies.

  The early Dutch settlers were different. When they established their North American colony in New York in 1624, their first shipload of settlers brought along cows, as well as sheep and pigs. And in 1625, yet more cows, sheep, horses, and pigs arrived. Ships with names such as Cow and Sheep and Horse were specially designed to transport livestock.

  After arriving, the cows were quickly ferried from what is now Governors Island to Manhattan, which had good pastureland. But despite this, the colony’s religious leader, Jonas Michaelius, wrote back to Amsterdam that they did not have enough milk or butter and needed more cows. More black-and-white cows from Friesland were sent. In 1639 anyone who was willing to settle in what was now called New Netherlands was given free passage, a house, a barn, farming equipment, four horses, four cows, sheep, and pigs. After six years they were obligated to give back four cows, but by then they were expected to have bred more than that.

  De Verstandige Kock, translated in 1989 by the Dutch American food writer Peter G. Rose as The Sensible Cook, was first published in Holland in 1667 and became the leading cookbook of the New Netherlands colony. One recipe uses cream and eggs to make a rich porridge:

  Take 12 Egg yolks, a pint of cream, pour the Eggs through a sieve and mix well with the Cream, add to it Rosewater and Sugar appropriately, place it on the fire, stir it gently until it thickens, but do not boil or it will separate.

  A number of other equally egg-rich custards were also included in the cookbook. This was the lemon custard:

  Take the juice from the Lemons and the yolks from 8 Eggs, but add only the white of four, grate a White-bread of half a stuyver [2.5 cents’ worth, though it is difficult to say how much bread half a stuyver might have bought—a small loaf seems a good guess], then a pint of Sweet Milk and Sugar proportionately, neither too vigorously or too slow you should let it boil.

  Yet another recipe used buttermilk to make an applesauce, called apple-a-milk:

  Take Aeghten [a variety of sour apple] Apples peeled and with the cores well removed, place them in a pot with some Butter and Rosewater. Let it cook until it is fine like porridge, mash it steadily with the spoon, then add a little Wheat-flour, add a proportionate amount of Buttermilk. Let it cook together until it is like sweet cream, then add some Sugar and White-bread.

  Buttermilk was well liked in the North American colonies, although in the South it was mostly given to slaves. Cottage cheese was also made. Originally it was a product for home consumption, but it grew in popularity and eventually became a mainstay of the American diet, though “popular” may not be the right word. It earned a reputation as a diet food, and many people ate it without really liking it. In 1968, when Richard Nixon was running for president, his campaign managers were looking for opportunities to make him appear more human and endearing. For Nixon was one of the least cuddly of politicians, stiff and often ill-tempered, with a tendency to go off in strange directions when least expected. While campaigning in Oregon, Nixon went on statewide television and took questions from ordinary people. One question was “How do you keep your weight down?” Partly by eating cottage cheese, he said. But he confessed to hating it:

  I eat cottage cheese till it runs out of my ears. But I’ve learned a way to eat it that makes it not too bad. I put ketchup on it. At least that way it doesn’t taste like cottage cheese. I’ll tell you where I
learned that—from my grandmother. My grandmother lived to be ninety-one years of age, and she always mixed ketchup with her cottage cheese.

  But of course cottage cheese doesn’t have to be low in fat. The Waldorf-Astoria’s Swiss-born chef Oscar Tschirky, the most famous chef in New York in the late nineteenth century, gave the following advice on how to make cottage cheese. It has little to do with simple, partially drained curds, which is the way cottage cheese is normally made:

  A richer way is to put equal parts of buttermilk and thick milk into a kettle together over the fire, heat it until nearly ready to boil, pour into a linen bag and let it drain until the next day. Then remove, salt, and put in a little cream, or butter, according to whether it is thick or not and make up into balls the size of an orange.

  Spoilage was a constant problem. In America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, buckets of milk or cream were lowered into wells to keep them cool, and butter and cheese were kept in cold cellars.

  Butter turning rancid was an issue. Catherine Beecher’s 1869 book, American Woman’s Home, which she mostly wrote herself, though it also bears the name of her more famous sister, the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, describes how an entire meal can be ruined by bad butter:

  A matter of despair as regards bad butter is, that at the tables where it is used, it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every other food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread, which fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beef-steak, which proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string beans, and polluting the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, in the succotash, in the squash; the beets swim in it, and the onions have it poured over them. Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself at the dessert; but the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague. You are ready to howl with despair and your misery is great upon you—especially if this is a table where you have taken board for three months with your delicate wife and four small children. Your case is dreadful, and it is hopeless, because long use and habit have rendered your host incapable of discovering what is the matter. “Don’t like the butter, sir? I assure you I paid an extra price for it, and it’s the very best in the market. I looked over as many as a hundred tubs, and picked out this one.” You are dumb, but not less despairing.

  Many cookbooks offered dubious solutions. Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book, an 1867 book by Annabella P. Hill, recommended:

  To recover rancid butter or lard—Use Darby’s prophylactic fluid by the directions that accompany the bottles; cream it thoroughly, then put the butter in a clean vessel.

  Darby’s prophylactic fluid had been invented by John Darby, and according to him, this panacea contained hypochlorite of potassa (potassium hydroxide) and a cocktail of sodas and salts. It was widely used in the South.

  Many nationalities weighed in on the butter issue. Elena Molokhovets’s A Gift to Young Housewives, first published in 1861, was the leading cookbook of the prerevolutionary Russian aristocracy. She offered numerous recipes for “rectifying” spoiled butter:

  Thoroughly wash the spoiled butter in several changes of water. Add salt and juice from carrots that have been grated and squeezed through a cloth. Mix until completely incorporated.

  Carrot juice gives the butter a very delicate, pleasant taste but it is better to add it just before serving, because this butter will only keep for a few days.

  It is significant that the first attempt to build a refrigerator in the United States was undertaken for keeping butter (as opposed to what happened in Australia, where in 1853 James Harrison, a Scot who had moved there, developed the first really fully functional refrigerator and used it for chilling beer). In 1803, Thomas Moore of Maryland built a metal box for butter surrounded by ice that was held in an outer cedar box insulated with fur. He carried butter in his box, which he called a refrigerator, the first use of the word, the twenty miles from his Maryland farm to the food market in Georgetown. At the market, his hard, fresh butter was a sensation and shoppers gladly paid a higher price for it. But Moore failed in his ultimate goal of creating a refrigerator industry. People wanted to buy the butter, but not the refrigerator (though Thomas Jefferson did buy one).

  Spoilage was not the only problem. In 1863, Isabella Beeton, an Englishwoman married at age nineteen and dead from the birth of her fourth child at age twenty-nine, published Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, one of the most widely read food books in the history of the English language. She pointed out that butter can have a very “agreeable flavor.” But it all depended on what the cows are being fed, and some cows produced “bad butter.”

  Butter and cheese were made on the farm by women. It was hard physical labor that took long hours. Lisa Smith described the process in the eighteenth century:

  As soon as you have milked, strain your milk into a pot, and stir it often for half an hour, then put it in your pans or trays; when it is creamed. Skim it exceedingly clean from the milk, and put your cream into an earthen pot, if you do not churn immediately for butter, shift your cream once in twelve hours into another clean scalded pot, and if you had any milk at the bottom of the pot, put it away; when you have churned with your butter in three or four waters and then salt it to your taste, and beat it well, but do not wash it after it is salted, let it stand in a wedge, if it be to pot, till the next morning, and beat it again, and make your layers the thickness of three fingers, and then throw a little salt on it, and so do till your pot is full.

  It is the “churned,” “beat it well,” and “beat it again” aspect of this recipe that is exhausting.

  “Churning butter,” The Illustrated London News, November 4, 1876.

  A device was invented to use the motion of rocking a cradle to help churn butter. A balance bar was hooked up to a cradle on one end and a butter churner on the other. As the mother gently rocked the cradle, perhaps with one foot so her hands were free for another task, the butter was being churned.

  From Jamestown and Plymouth until after the Civil War, American food was basically English. This was why they rarely made any cheese other than cheddar, and if they did, it was probably Wiltshire. In the colonial period, Americans followed the popular English cookbooks of the time—by Gervase Markham, Hannah Glasse, and especially Eliza Smith, whose book was published in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1742, a decade after she had died. There were some additions to the American edition of Smith’s book, including a remedy for rattlesnake bites and a “Cure for Poison.” These remedies were given to the book’s publisher by a man named Caesar, who was a black slave. He was granted his freedom and £100 a year for the rest of his life in exchange for the remedies.

  “The first American cookbook,” so called because it came out in 1796, after the War of Independence, was published in Hartford, Connecticut, and authored by Amelia Simmons, presumably an American, though almost nothing is known about her, including her place of birth. She did call herself “an American Orphan,” but most of her recipes are clearly English, despite the claim on the title page that they are “adapted to this country.” However, her syllabub recipe, which calls for directly milking from the cow, uses cider, which does seem American:

  TO MAKE A FINE SYLLABUB FROM THE COW

  Sweeten a quart of Cyder with double refined sugar, grate nutmeg into it, then milk your cow into your liquour, when you have thus added what quantity of milk you think proper, pour half a pint or more, in proportion to the quantity of Syllabub you make, of the sweetest cream you can get all over it.

  Simmons offered four recipes for “creams,” which was significant in a recipe book that was only fifty pages long. Creams, which were more like what we would call today a mousse, were an eighteenth-century fashion. Eliza Smith gave fifteen cream recipes in her book, and Hannah Glasse sixteen. Simmons chose to include “a fine cream” and a lemon, raspberry, and “whipt” cream. This is her fine cream:

  Take
a pint of cream, sweeten it to your palate, grate a little nutmeg, put in a spoonful of orange flower water and rose water and two spoonfuls of wine; beat up four eggs and two whites, stir it all together one way over the fire till it is thick, have cups ready and pour it in.

  This is a fairly simple recipe compared to some of the English creams. Eliza Smith had the same idea as Simmons, which she called “blanched cream”; it was probably the origin of Simmons’s recipe:

  Take a quart of the thickest sweet cream you can get, season with fine sugar and orange flower water; then boil it, then beat the whites of twenty eggs, with a little cold cream, take out the treddles [meaning dung or perhaps dirt?], and when the cream is on the fire and boils, pour in your eggs; stirring it very well until it comes to a thick curd; then take it up and pass it through a hair sieve [circular wooden frames with woven horsehair screens were a common kitchen tool for centuries]; then beat it very well with a spoon till it is cold and put it in dishes for use.

  An unusual and intriguing variation of a cream was offered by Elizabeth Raffald, a domestic from Yorkshire, in her 1769 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper. She called it La Pompadour cream:

  Beat the whites of five eggs to a strong froth, put them into a tossing pan, with two spoonfuls of orange flower water [and] two ounces of sugar, stir it gently for three or four minutes, then pour it into your dish, and pour good melted butter over it, and send it in hot.—It is a pretty corner dish for a second course at dinner.