Milk by Anne Mendelson Read Free Book Online Page A

modern times, when consciously market-oriented dairying choices began outstripping home-centered ones. In any case, cheeses of all kinds eventually predominated over other ways of consuming milk.
    The Romans themselves were great pioneers in cheesemaking, because parts of northern Italy were lucky enough to possess both rich grazing lands and a climate cool enough for the prolonged fermentation processes that aged cheeses require. Besides, the city ofRome at its height was a magnet for specialized luxuries from the countryside that would not be equaled in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. But the Romans had a hard time making sense of the non-Roman ways with milk—perhaps cheese—peculiar to northerners.
    Because cattle were more important to both Romans andGreeks as beasts of burden than as sources of milk, neither civilization had deeply explored all theculinary qualities of cows’ milk liked by other peoples. Greek observers returning from Scythia on the southern fringes of theNortheastern Cow Belt reported that people there consumed an alien stuff for which they could find no better designation than “cow cheese,” or boutyron —a word that makes a certain amount of sense, and that became the Latin butyrum (and our “butter”). But when the Romans got to “Transalpine Gaul,” or the Gaulish lands beyond the Alps, it is difficult to sort out just what they meant to say about the uncouth peoples’ dairy foods. Their accounts present major roadblocks for anyone trying to establish in what form the peoples of the new Roman possessions liked to consume milk.
    Tacitus andPliny the Elder, both of whom had been stationed in Gaul afterJulius Caesar’s conquests, unmistakably say that the barbarians ate some form of curdledmilk. The term Tacitus uses is not caseus (“cheese”) but lac concretum (“solidified milk”), while Pliny marvels at the very fact that cheese was not known among the Gaulish tribes; he vaguely describes the usual form of milk as something that they “thicken to a pleasantsour substance,” but doesn’t seem to distinguish this very clearly frombutter. Caesar laconically says that the Gauls ate “milk, cheese, and meat,” which leaves us wondering about the contradiction with Pliny (who presumably had more knowledge of the colony’s peacetime domestic arts) and whether “milk” specifically meant fresh milk.
    All of which goes to show that despite the odd genetic makeup of the peoples who were living in the Northwestern Cow Belt a couple of thousand years ago, conclusions about how often they actually used their unusual ability to drink unsoured milk are impossible. Certainly they did turn milk into various curdled forms (meaning ones with most of the lactose removed). But we also know that their better-documented descendants during the Middle Ages sometimes drank cows’ and other animals’ milk fresh, sometimes turned it into various soured products, fresh cheeses, butter, and aged cheeses. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to guess that the pre-Roman Gauls also enjoyed both fresh milk for drinking and milk variously transformed by lactic-acid bacteria.
THEMEDIEVAL PICTURE
    As in the other major dairying zones, no fresh milk industry existed inmedieval Europe, or could have. Milk didn’t change hands for money as often as it was consumed by small householders with their own cow or goat. Most farming was comparatively small-scale and unspecialized except for a few great commodities like wool. Dairy husbandry was usually a home enterprise, with peasants or smallholders milking an animal or two (rarely many more) and sometimes drinking part of the milk fresh or soured before making it into other simple products for their own use. Where larger operations existed, they were usually part of monastery or manor farms.
    In most of northwestern Europe, butter was the cheapest and most plentiful of fats rather than anything epicurean.Cream was not particularly prized in cooking; when it was