Let’s Take Back the World of Milk: Lead On, Anne Mendelson
When I arrived in the United States some considerable number of years ago, I was stunned by the dairy products. Stunned as with a stun gun, not with joyous amazement.
The only milk available was not just pasteurized but homogenized and had Vitamin D added as well. No lovely layer of cream rose to the top. The cheese came in foil or plastic packs. Butter was outweighed by margarine twenty to one. Cream was thin and oily and had to be semi-frozen before it could be whipped.
How could the richest country in the world tolerate such stuff? I cut a panel off the side of a milk carton and sent it to my English dairy farmer father.
True, some things have improved since then, particularly if you search. You can get some decent cheese. Ditto yogurt. But it’s still the case that gums hold cream cheese and yogurt together, that you have to hunt down plain yogurt, that cream that has not been ultra-pasteurized is a rarity, and that–amazing–whole milk is a sign of a neighborhood in serious need of gentrification. In the average grocery store, it’s still slim pickings.
Now milk and milk products have found their advocate in the form of Anne Mendelson. Today is the official publication date of her book, Milk, published by Knopf. Anne Mendelson will be known to many of you. She’s the author of the incisive biography of America’s most famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. And she writes informative, generous cook book reviews for pubications such as Gourmet and the New York Times, the kind of reviews that actually move discussion of the topic at hand to a new level.
I should probably say that I was the recipient of one of those kind reviews. And that since then Anne and I have sat together, usually on benches it seems for some odd reason, to chat about milk and Milton and many other matters. I like to think, though, that I am not unreasonably swayed by all this.
Because whether Anne is known to you or not, you’re in for a treat with Milk. It’s as delightfully written as everything she publishes while not pulling punches, condescending, or dodging tough issues. She has many sub-themes that I shall return to later: clear explanations of complicated food science of milk; good sense on the virtuous food camp’s ideas about raw and organic milk; and provocative claims about milk’s historical geography among others. I’ll be returning to some of these themes over the next few weeks.
But running through the book is a single thread. We need to recover a huge heritage milky delights. We’ve been led astray by the emphasis on milk as a drink and milk as a source of hard cheese. Both are fine but they are a recent by-way in the long distinguished history of milk products. She wants to re-introduce us to all the lightly fermented yogurts, buttermilks, and fresh cheeses, to real butter and cream, to the boiled down milk products of India and Latin America.
To illustrate this she has all kinds of recipes all of which she has obviously tried in her own kitchen. Some are for classics-béchamel, hot chocolate, rice pudding. Some are a little more unusual-ají de leche, hoppelpoppel, buttermilk-caraway soup. And some ease the reader into new adventures. Look at this.
“Fresh white cheese: Kindergarten version
Go buy a cardboard carton–two, if you’re game–of cultured buttermilk. It should be made without salt or gummy stabilizers, and preferably should have a milkfat content of at least 1.5 percent. Place the unopened carton)s) in a deep pot such as a stockpot or asparagus steam and add enough cold water to come close to the top of the cartons. Bring the water to a full boil over high heat. Remove the pot from the heat and let the whole thing cool to room temperature.
Open the carton’s and dump the contents into [a cloth-lined] colander. [Then tie the cloth with a string and hand to drip]. When the whey stops dripping, turn out the drained curd into a bowl and briefly work it with a wooden spoon. Work in a pinch or two of salt and a dash of cream, if desired. Store in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for three or four days, and use in any way you would use commercial cottage or pot cheese.”
Enticing.
A book to treasure.
“The only milk available was not just pasteurized but homogenized and had Vitamin D added as well. No lovely layer of cream rose to the top.”
I drank milk copiously as a child. In the early 1970s, Korea didn’t have an established “artisanal” or industrial dairy tradition. My mother had to boil the milk at home over a charcoal stove before I drank it. We didn’t have a refrigerator either.
In 1975 when we arrived in the States my family thought clean milk in sterile containers ready for consumption was one of the greatest things about American supermarkets.
What an interesting contrast. I’m going to think of some way of using this.