The Astonishing Story of Real Milk

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Versatile milk can be transformed into many wonderful forms: cheese, cream, milk, yogurt and more. PHOTO: FOTOLIA/VALENTYN VOLKOV

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Once upon a time, cows supplied us with delicious whole milk, wonderful fresh cream, skim milk fit to drink, refreshing soured skim milk, nutrient-rich curd and whey, truly lovely butter and real buttermilk. A single batch of fresh milk could have yielded still other transformations — yogurt, fresh cheese or clotted cream, for instance.

Like so many of today’s supermarket offerings, modern “milk” and dairy products have lost the rich flavors our ancestors enjoyed. Can we recapture the culinary magic that is ancient dairy chemistry? What’s going on with the small scale artisans who still practice this traditional magic? Could our collective voices move the American dairy industry to bring us real milk, in less manhandled and denatured form? We have reasons to be hopeful.

Dairy Foods in Today’s America

Thousands of years ago in the Near East, somebody saw an animal nursing her young and had the eccentric idea of getting in on the act. A strange custom, this, using another creature’s milk for food. But in regions where it took hold, milk became the object of prehistoric skills that we can still learn from.

In the late 1960s, before waves of immigration brought people from every corner of the globe to the United States, the American food scene had two goals: to get as many different products as possible before the buying public, and to weed out alternatives that would interfere with profits. Both aims merrily coexist today, with lunatic results exemplified by, let’s say, yogurt. You can now walk into a supermarket and take your pick of “amaretto cheesecake” nonfat yogurt, low-fat yogurt with Reese’s Pieces, or milk-free chocolate soy yogurt — without being able to find anything that people brought up on the real thing would recognize as real yogurt worth putting a spoon into.

But today, the tide of immigration is beginning to redraw the picture so that you may now have access to grocery stores with fresh, plain yogurt, or Indian restaurants with delicious buttermilk-based cold beverages. Where Russian immigrants have settled, wonderful sour cream, farmer cheese and butter with the taste of clotted cream have followed. The list can only grow as more foreign-born cooks find themselves able to introduce people to some “new” (though really old) dairy products.

These culinary introductions may help encourage the growing revolt against milk processed to a fare-thee-well before any of us get our hands on it. For all the continued prominence of horrible examples to the contrary, finding honest milk from small dairies run by people who care about well-tended animals and fresh flavor is more possible than ever. (To find one near you, search at Local Harvest or Eat Wild. For small-scale dairy equipment, visit Bob-White Systems.)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print