Milk by Anne Mendelson Read Free Book Online Page B

skimmed, it went into butter. The ever-useful by-product of that process was truebuttermilk. Not too dissimilar from some of today’s cultured buttermilk was whole milk fermented just long enough to become refreshingly tart but still liquid enough to drink, perhaps close to Pliny’s “pleasant sour substance” and analogous to the yogurt of southern regions. People do not seem to have cooked with fresh milk nearly as much as we do; at any rate, it crops up less often in surviving medieval cookbooks than almond milk.
    The fresh cheeses that were ordinarily the most practical kinds for householders to produce were based sometimes on the skim milk saved from buttermaking, sometimes on whole milk. (In the latter case any butterfat that drained off along with thewhey was separately saved for whey butter. The whey itself furnished a common drink; if people didn’t consume it, it often ended up inpig swill.) Fresh cheeses ranged from simple curds, eaten either along with the whey or after being drained of it, to “green cheese,” or curds allowed to take on a cheesier nature but eaten before aging. The curdling could be done by bacterial souring, rennet, or a combination of the two, with the flavor and texture varying according to how strong the action of the acid or enzyme was and how far coagulation was allowed to proceed.
A NEW AGE DAWNS
    So far, the region’s dairying preferences had much in common with those of northeastern Europe—and even the older milking lands of the Near East, when it came to the importance of soured milk and fresh cheeses. But a few centuries or generations before Columbus, something started happening that would propel western Europe and later North America toward radically changed ideas of food, or rather of how to buy and sell it.
    One way to describe the change is that the economic center of gravity began to revolve around cities, which (like imperial Rome in its day) looked increasingly to the countryside to supply them with food. Another way to look at it is that most kinds of specialized farming for profit got to northwestern Europe sooner than anywhere else in the world, foreshadowing the modern commercial production and transport of many foods. One of the first results was an expanding interest inripened cheeses, already better known here than in any other stronghold of dairying. The larger kinds were not economically feasible to produce except through sizable cooperative ventures that pooled the milk and labor of many farmers (or a whole village or district) and rested on the knowledge that a market for the end result justified the expense of production as well as transportation to towns and cities.
    During the many European economic shakeups following the Age of Discovery, more and more milk was diverted to large-scale manufacture of aged and other specialized cheeses, usually fromcows’ milk. Fresh cheeses continued to be eaten in the northwest, but with snowballing urbanization and the displacement of peasants from the countryside in many areas, they were less often made and consumed in the households of people who actually owned a cow or goat. The farmers who remained either participated in large-scale cheesemaking based on milk pooled from a group of farms or carried out independent small-scale dairying for profit. Farmstead dairying was chiefly managedby women, who producedbutter and fresh or aged cheeses (often bearing regional names) for nearby markets.
    It began to be not only possible but highly desirable to target market segments, to put forth products that might claim distinction by virtue of novelty, unusual appearance, or manufacturing nuances reflected in some fillip of flavor or texture. In other words, western European dairyists were ready for a systematic commercial exploitation of diversity more intensive than anything in older regions. The contents of today’s more ambitious cheese shops reflect the aggressive, long-continued pursuit of this aim—which incidentally