Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  INDUSTRIAL COWS

  The Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company began operating in Europe a decade after Borden started up his company in America. By the 1880s, the European firm was producing 25 million cans of condensed milk a year. Condensing milk was a way of preserving it, which was a welcome idea in places such as Wisconsin and Switzerland, where milk was being produced faster than it could be sold.

  Condensed milk also offered a solution for Australia, which depended on long-distance export markets. Toogoolawah, a small town in South Queensland, got its first condensed milk producer in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1929, Nestlé merged with Anglo-Swiss, bought the plant, and moved it to Victoria as part of a plan to set up condensed milk plants throughout Asia.

  1883 condensed milk advertisement for the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company, founded in 1881 by Charles Page, the American consul in Zurich. Seeing the success of Borden, he started his company with Swiss milk but aimed at the British market. The company became one of Borden’s main competitors until it merged with Nestlé.

  Once milk was pasteurized and deemed safe, the principal reason for using condensed milk was that it was less expensive than fresh milk or cream. Sarah Rorer, in her 1913 book on ice cream and frozen puddings, said, “Ordinary fruit creams may be made with condensed milk at a cost of about fifteen cents a quart, which of course, is cheaper than ordinary milk and cream.” In 1927, the General Electric Company published a book on cooking called The Electric Refrigerator Recipes. In it was this advice on “How to Use Evaporated Milk”:

  When it is inconvenient to use heavy cream, evaporated milk can be used instead with excellent results. The mixture is not as rich or expensive as a frozen dessert made with cream. It will be smooth and not icy unless it stands in the refrigerator for an unusually long time.

  Put evaporated milk in top of double boiler and heat over water. Let it cook 3 to 4 minutes or until milk is scalded. Pour into bowl. Cool in a room temperature pan. The flavor is more delicate if it remains in the refrigerator for several hours, without freezing. Beat with an egg beater until very light. Evaporated milk must be scalded and then chilled before it can be whipped like cream. One cup will increase in bulk two or three times. It may be used unbeaten if preferred. It can replace the cream in any mousse or ice cream which contains gelatin.

  Fannie Farmer gave a clear explanation of how to scald milk in her 1896 book:

  Put in top of double boiler, having water boil in under part. Cover and let stand on top of range until milk around edge of double boiler has a bead-like appearance.

  Condensed milk became profitable, and a number of companies started producing it. The quality of the cans improved and the milk improved. In 1909 the problem of fat separation, reduced through low-heat evaporation but never completely eliminated, was at last resolved by a process called homogenization. It is one of those ideas that seem obvious once someone thinks of it. The milk is forced through a very fine screen so that the fat globules become tiny particles, and so no longer separate. The idea had originally been developed in France in the 1890s by Paul Marix for making margarine. Then other Frenchmen also working on artificial butter further refined the idea. Once homogenization came into use, evaporated milk no longer separated in the can, and its shelf life was greatly increased.

  The Paris World’s Fair of 1900 featured the debut of a new kind of engine developed by Rudolf Diesel, talking films, and an escalator. The new Art Nouveau design was also on display, as well as an exhibit on the contributions of African American people to American society by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Less noticed was Auguste Gaulin’s lait homogenisé, the world’s first homogenized fresh milk. It had been developed the year before in Paris by Gaulin, the owner of the Gaulin Dairy Machinery Equipment Company. Visitors at the fair were uncertain what to think of this invention, which they called lait fixé, fixed milk, but after the fair ended, Gaulin improved his machine and it became a huge success, used in the making of evaporated milk and industrially made ice cream.

  But while the milk industry embraced homogenized milk, the general public did not like their fresh milk homogenized. They missed the “creamline,” the place where the cream met the milk in the bottle. And so the milk industry came up with a number of strange and unappetizing demonstrations to convince the public of the value of homogenization. One demonstration was conducted by the McDonald Dairy in Flint, Michigan, soon after they started selling homogenized milk in 1932. In an extraordinary statement, they informed the public that they had hired “professionals” to drink both regular and homogenized milk “under controlled laboratory conditions” and then to regurgitate the milks. This clearly showed that the curds from the homogenized group had been better digested. The vomited curds were then placed in jars in formaldehyde and given to milkmen show to customers along their routes.

  When I was a boy, in the 1950s, a milkman delivered bottles of milk to our home in a metal carrying rack. The top part of each bottle, all the way down the neck, was a darker color than the rest of bottle—the cream had separated out. You shook the bottle and then poured. My brothers and sister and I loved that milk, and we each had a tall, cold glass of it every morning. But one day we didn’t like the milk anymore. There was something wrong with it. It was all one color. We tried several different brands, but they were all the same. Milk wasn’t as good anymore and we didn’t love it the way we used to. The age of homogenized milk had begun. Soon nearly all milk in America was homogenized.

  Condensed milk became a key ingredient in a number of sweets and caused a growth in the popularity of fudge in Britain and the United States. The origin of fudge is uncertain, but it is generally thought to be an American invention from the 1880s. By then condensed milk was commonly available, but it does not seem to have been used at first to make fudge. The first documented making of fudge was in Baltimore by a man who sold it for forty cents a pound. A Vassar student, Emelyn B. Hartridge, acquired his recipe, which used fresh milk:

  2 cups granulated white sugar

  1 cup cream

  2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

  1 tablespoon butter

  Combine sugar and cream and cook over moderate heat. When this becomes very hot, add the chocolate. Stir constantly. Cook until mixture reaches soft ball stage (234°–238°F). Remove from heat and add butter. Cool slightly, then mix until fudge starts to thicken. Transfer to a buttered tin. Cut into diamond-shaped pieces before fudge hardens completely.

  From Vassar, the making of fudge spread to sister schools Wellesley and Smith. None of the recipes used condensed milk, and fudge made with fresh milk is difficult to execute successfully. But by the turn of the century, fudge makers had discovered condensed milk, and in time condensed milk became a standard ingredient in the sweet. Later, marshmallow fluff became another essential ingredient for making a good fudge.

  Marshmallow fluff was invented in 1917 by Archibald Query in Somerville, Massachusetts. He made and sold it out of his home. After World War I, two Massachusetts veterans, H. Allen Durkee and Fred L. Mower, commercialized it. Fresh from the battlefields of France, they called it Toot Sweet Marshmallow Fluff at first, but soon dropped the “Toot Sweet” because no one got it. By the 1930s they were sponsoring radio programs all over New England, and marshmallow fluff was becoming well known, though it is not certain who first used it in fudge. Here is the definitive fudge recipe from the doyenne of American cookie recipes, Maida Heatter. Note that “condensed” and “evaporated” milk are interchangeable terms:

  Optional: 7 ounces (2 cups) pecans toasted or walnut halves or pieces

  5 ounces (about 2/3 cup) evaporated milk

  1 jar (7 ounces) marshmallow creme

  1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter

  1 1/2 cups sugar

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  12 ounces (2 cups) semisweet chocolate morsels

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  Line an 8-inch square pan with aluminum foil: T
urn pan upside down, center a 12-inch square of foil shiny side down over the pan, press down the sides and corners of the foil to shape it to the pan, remove the foil, turn the pan right side up, place the shaped foil in the pan and gently press the foil into place in the pan. Set aside the lined pan.

  Pick over the optional nuts carefully (sometimes they include a piece of shell), and remove and reserve about ½ cup of the best-looking halves or pieces to decorate the fudge. Set nuts aside.

  Pour evaporated milk into a heavy saucepan. Add the marshmallow creme, butter, sugar and salt. Place over low heat; stir constantly with a wooden spatula until the mixture comes to a boil. This mixture wants to burn; adjust the heat as necessary and scrape the bottom of the pan occasionally with a rubber spatula to be sure it is not burning.

  As soon as the mixture comes to a full boil, start timing it; let it boil, stirring continuously, 5 minutes. (The mixture will caramelize slightly. It is not necessary to test the mixture with a thermometer—just time it—the temperature will be 226 to 228 degrees when the boiling time is up.)

  Remove saucepan from heat; add morsels. Stir until melted and smooth; stir in vanilla. Stir in 1 1/2 cups of the nuts. Quickly pour into the pan; smooth the top. Place remaining ½ cup nuts on top, spacing them evenly and pressing down enough so they will not fall off.

  Let stand until cool; chill until firm. Remove the fudge from the pan by lifting the corners of the foil. Carefully cut the fudge into pieces. Wrap individually in clear cellophane, wax paper or aluminum foil. Or place the fudge in an airtight freezer box. If you want to store for more than a few days, freeze it.

  Note: To toast nuts, place in a shallow pan in the middle of a 350 degree oven, stirring occasionally, until very hot but not until they become dark, 12–15 minutes.

  In British-ruled late-nineteenth-century India, enormous amounts of condensed milk were used to feed babies. The Indians also started using sweetened condensed milk for their tea and even for their frozen dessert, kulfi, altering a recipe dating back to the sixteenth century. In China, where condensed milk was also imported for babies in the nineteenth century, it started to be used in one of their rare milk dishes, “fried milk.”

  In the Dominican Republic, batida de lechosa, virtually the national refreshment, is made from condensed milk, papaya, and sugar put through a blender, sometimes with a few drops of vanilla extract added.

  Entirely new dishes were also created. In Argentina, dulce de leche, a thick dark caramel sauce made with reduced sweetened condensed milk, became a national dish. There are numerous ways of cooking down condensed milk, but the popular technique is to just put the can in a pot of boiling water and leave it there for four or five hours. Simple, but there is a catch. If the water is allowed to boil away to the point where part of the can is exposed to air, it will explode.

  An oddity of the milk business in America and in Europe was that its growth was not determined by demand. Sometimes production grew faster than demand. What was motivating farmers was that the price for milk was so low that a farm had to have more cows and produce more milk just to stay viable. In the nineteenth century, the New England family farm with only three to five cows found survival nearly impossible. The trend continued and by the twentieth century, the forty-cow farm was finding survival difficult.

  As Americans moved west, to places with more open land, the number of cows in America kept growing. In 1850 there were 6,585,094; in 1900 there were 17,135,094, almost triple the 1850 number.

  The importance of breeding was recognized in Europe long before it was recognized in America. The English farmer William Ellis wrote in 1750, “She was a healthy one, hardy, gentle, and easy milked. Such a cow as this deserves to have her breed increased.” In the eighteenth century, British farmers started realizing that the quality of the bull had much to do with the quality of the cows he sired. In 1726, John Lawrence, “a country gentleman,” penned a book called New System of Agriculture. In it he wrote that more attention needed to be paid to the bull because “the males of all creatures are the principal in the breed and generation.” Though his logic seems a bit dubious, his fundamental insight, that it took more than a good cow to give birth to another good cow, was an important one. British farmers began to realize that it was a waste to have a high-quality cow breed with any available bull, or as they put it, “everybody’s son.” A list of desirable bull traits started to be established: A bull should have a broad forehead, his eyes should be large and black, his horns should be long, his hair smooth as velvet, his neck thick, his chest big, his buttocks square, and more. Different farmers had different standards, and different breeds were created. Owing to the reputation of Dutch cows to be productive milkers, they were brought in to English farms to either serve as a separate breed or be used for crossbreeding.

  Originally most European livestock was bred for the quality of its beef or its strength as draft animals. But in the eighteenth century, some of the new breeds, such as the Jerseys and Guernseys from the Channel Islands, started to earn reputations for the quality of their milk. The Ayrshire breed in southwestern Scotland, an early breed from the seventeenth century, was not developed for dairy, but in the eighteenth century, it was realized that these cows produced an unusually high yield of milk that was also particularly good-tasting. It had a high lactose content, giving it a sweet taste. It also had unusually small and uniform fat globules, which before homogenization was a highly desirable trait.

  Ayrshire

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the best cow breeds were brought from Europe to America. Among them were the British Shorthorns, which for a time became the leading American dairy cow; Holstein-Frisians from North Holland; Ayrshires from Scotland; Jerseys and Guernseys and Red Polls from the south of England; Brown Swiss and Simental from Switzerland; and Normandys from France. One of the most appreciated British breeds of the nineteenth century was the Alderney, a small cow of Norman origin from the Channel Islands, cited by Mrs. Beeton as having the richest milk. A few Alderneys were imported to America, after which the pure breed became mixed out of existence in the Channel Islands. According to some cattle experts, the closest thing to a true Alderney today is found in America. But this claim can also be disputed.

  The United States now had the best breeds from all the best milk regions. Improved cow breeds pushed the average annual yield of a cow from 1,436 pounds of milk in 1850 to 3,646 in 1900. America was awash in milk. Fortunately, there were products besides fresh milk that had room for industrial growth—condensed milk, baby formula, and cheese were all growing markets.

  Brown Swiss

  The distance that a dairy product could travel started to increase in the 1840s with the development of the railroads. This element added to the farmers’ cost of production but also created new opportunities for cheese. Until the 1850s, farms did not produce enough milk to support a cheese factory. Each farm might make a few cheeses. In New England they formed cooperatives, with farmers pooling their milk for cheese production, and such cooperatives are still common there.

  The first permanent cheese factory and industrial-scale cheesemaker in America was established in Rome, New York, in 1851 by Jesse Williams, who came from a cheesemaking family. Having learned the lessons of the Industrial Revolution, Williams produced cheese on an assembly line. A decade later, factory cheese became easier to make when mass-produced rennet became available.

  For years there were many who thought a factory system wasn’t suitable for cheesemaking. From a gastronomic perspective, that is still a fair subject for debate, but by the end of the century there was little doubt that cheese factories were economically viable. This was the age of factories, and they were the heralded solution to most every problem.

  Xerxes Addison Willard, a leading spokesman for the dairy industry, wrote in 1865:

  The questions have been frequently asked: Is the factory system destined to stand the test of years? Is it to continue to prosper? Or will it soon break up and dair
ymen return again to the old order of cheese making? In my opinion, it is to live. The system is a progressive step, and all history teaches that when that is taken it is difficult to retrace it.

  Cheese factories did prosper, but artisanal cheesemakers have also survived.

  Wisconsin had almost too much milk, and the state started becoming a large-scale cheese producer. Who first industrialized Wisconsin cheese is not clear. It is often said that the first cheese factory in Wisconsin was built by Hiram Smith in Sheboygan County in 1858, but he stopped making cheese after a year and the factory became a fresh milk plant. In 1864, Chester Hazen built a cheese factory in Ladoga, also often cited as the first Wisconsin cheese factory.

  In the mid-1870s, John Jossi of Dodge County, Wisconsin, started producing his own type of cheese, which he called brick and made in a factory owned by the Swiss Cheese Company in Wisconsin. He then opened other factories around Wisconsin. His company, in continuous production until the end of 1943, was eventually acquired by the Kraft Cheese Company.

  By the turn of the century, Wisconsin was the leading cheese-producing state, with fifteen hundred factories of varying sizes.

  The Europeans were also starting to build cheese factories. In fact, the world’s first cheese factory was built in Switzerland in 1815, but it was not commercially successful. In England, the first cheese factory was opened in 1871, and in the Netherlands, in the 1880s. In the twentieth century, artisanal cheese went into rapid decline.

  In 1889, Adolph Tode, owner of the Manhattan Delicatessen in New York City and the Monroe Cheese company upstate, was having difficulty finding a reliable supply of a popular German cheese, Bismarck Schlosskäse. He asked his cheese company to produce it locally. A twenty-two-year-old, Emil Frey, started to work on it and in 1892 produced a cheese that, although not exactly like the German cheese, was close to it. In fact, Tode and others thought it was better. They named it Liederkranz; liederkranz means “singing society” in German, and Frey was a member of a singing group of that name. At first, Liederkranz cheese was a uniquely New York City food, but word of it spread and by 1926 there was not enough milk in Monroe County, New York, to make it. Production had to move to Van Wert, Ohio, in the Midwest, where there was an ample milk supply.