Random Ideas for Milk.

The title says it all today folks. I have something different planned for you tomorrow, so to end our milk series I give you a little cache of milk recipes that didn’t fit in the posts earlier in the week.

Milk Yeast.
Take a pint of new milk, a tea-spoonful of salt, and a large spoonful of flour stirred in; set it in a warm place, and it will be fit for use in an hour. Twice the quantity of common yeast is required for use. It must be used soon, as it will not keep.
The Family Doctor, or guide to health, (1844) by H.B.Skinner

Milk Soda.
Half fill a tumbler with milk, and pour upon it soda water.
The Invalid’s own book, Lady Mary Anne Boode Cust, 1853.

Milk Jelly.
Ingredients: One ounce of Iceland Moss. One quart of milk or water. Two tablespoonfuls of powdered loaf sugar.
Time required (after the Iceland Moss has soaked all night), for ‘Water Jelly’, about one hour; for ‘Milk Jelly’, about two hours.
To Make [Milk] Jelly with Iceland Moss:
1. Wash one ounce of Iceland moss well in cold water.
2. Then put it in a basin of cold water and let it soak all night.
3. After that time, take it out of the water and squeeze it dry in a cloth.
4. Then put it in a saucepan, with one quart of cold milk.
5. Put the saucepan on the fire and let it boil for two hours; you must stir it frequently.
6. Then strain it through a sieve into a basin, and sweeten it with loaf sugar, according to taste.
7. When it is cold, turn the jelly out of the basin onto a dish, and it is ready for use.
Lessons in Cookery: Handbook of the National Training School for Cookery (London, 1879)


A Delicious Candy.
Milk Candy is a delicious one for children. It can be made with either brown, castor, or loaf sugar. When made with brown sugar it becomes very hard, with castor sugar slightly sticky, with loaf sugar it is crisp. The method is the same whichever sugar is used, and it can be flavoured to suit the tastes of those who are going to eat it. Lemon juice, vanilla, and peppermint essence can all be used to flavour it. For brown or castor sugar, take a breakfastcupful of sugar and the same quantity of milk. Put the milk and sugar into an enamelled pan, bring it to the boil, and boil it 20 minutes, when the candy should set; pour it into a greased tin, and score it well with the point of a knife before it is cold or it will not break into nice neat pieces. When using loaf sugar, use half a pint of milk to a pound of sugar, and treat exactly as above described. A breakfastcupful of milk and one of sugar will only make a small quantity of candy, as it reduces so much in the boiling.
The Echo, [newspaper], London, July 11, 1905.

Quotation for the Day
I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple.
Bill Watterson

Milk Soup.

No-one utters the phrase ‘milk soup’ anymore, which I guess means that no-one makes it. If one did want to make milk soup, one would first of all have to decide on the style of the soup, for it seems that there are several.

In the time of the inimitable Hannah Glasse, author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), milk soup was essentially a custard or a custardy bread pudding.

Milk Soup the Dutch Way
Take a quart of milk, boil it with cinnamon and moist sugar; put sippets in the dish, pour the milk over it, and set it over a charcoal fire to simmer, till the bread is soft. Take the yolks of two eggs, beat them up, and mix it with a little of the milk, and throw it in; mix all together, and send it up to table.

One of the early vegetarian medical men included two recipes for milk soup in his book, Dr Allinson’s Cook Book (1915) The first one is a wheatmeal and vegetable puree, the second one ‘for children’ is another milk pudding.

Milk Soup.
2 onions, 2 turnips, 1 head of celery, 3 pints of milk, 1 pint of water, 2 tablespoons of Allison fine wheatmeal, pepper and salt to taste. Chop up the vegetables and boil them in the water until quite tender. Rub them through a sieve, return the whole to the saucepan, add pepper and salt, rub the wheatmeal smooth in the milk, let the soup simmer for 5 minutes, and serve.

Milk Soup for Children.
1½ pints of milk, 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful of Allinson fine wheatmeal, 1½ oz of sultanas, sugar to taste. Boil 1¼ pints of milk, add the sugar, beat up the egg with the rest of the milk and mix the wheatmeal smooth with it; stir this into the boiling milk, add the sultanas, and let the soup simmer for 10 minutes.

For a decidedly savoury option, we have, from Modern Domestic Cookery, and Useful Receipt Book, by William Augustus Henderson (1828.)

Milk Soup with Onions.
Take a dozen of onions, and set them over a stove till they are done without being coloured. Then boil some milk, add to it the onions, and season with salt alone. Put some butter onions to scald, then pass them in butter and when tender add it to the soup and serve it up.

And finally, a soup (or is it a custard?) which can be savoury or sweet at whim, from Food in Health and Disease, by Isaac Burney Yeo (1890)


Vermicelli Milk Soup.
Into a quart of boiling milk put a level saltspoonful of salt (or celery salt); add slowly (stirring constantly) 2 oz. of vermicelli; keep stirring for fifteen or twenty minutes, until quite soft. The yolks of two eggs should be added when the soup is ready to be removed from the fire. This soup may also be flavoured with cinnamon and sugar.

Quotation for the Day.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
Winston Churchill.

Sour Milk.

I thought I might give you a milk diet this week, as I don’t seem to have given much blog time to one of my favourite foods. A brief look at past posts suggests that the only story to date which focussed on milk was about koumiss and artificial asses’milk, although I have alsogiven you recipes for milk punch from 1724 and 1778, and of course a lot of milk puddings. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of milk, really, have I?

So, today I want to look at yoghurt – specifically the early Western experience of it, for the good reason that I can’t read very early references in Arabic or Turkish or other languages of its countries of origin!

The Oxford English Dictionary describes yoghurt as ‘a sour fermented liquor made from milk, used in Turkey and other countries of the Levant; now common in many English-speaking countries as a commercial semi-solid, often flavoured, foodstuff.’ It gives the first reference in English as appearing in 1625, as ‘Neither doe they [sc. the Turks] eate much Milke, except it bee made sower, which they call Yoghurd’ (S. Purchas Pilgrimmes II)

The Monthly Magazine, and American View for the Year 1800, in its section on Useful Economical Information included an extract from Eton’s Survey of the Turkish Empire which described the preparation of yoghurt in its native land, and which will serve for our recipe for the day.

The Arabians and the Turks have a preparation of milk, which has similar qualities to the kumiss of the Kalmuks: by the first, it is called leban; by the Turks, yaourt.

To make it, they put to new milk, made hot over the fire, some old leban, or yaourt. In a few hours, more or less, according to the temperature of the air, it be comes curdled, of an uniform consistence, and a most pleasant acid; the cream is in great part separated, leaving the curd light and semitransparent. The whey is much less subject to separate than in curds made with rennet with us, for the purpose of making cheese. Yaourt has this singular quality; that left to stand, it becomes daily sourer, and, at last, dries without having entered into the putrid fermentation. In this state, it is preserved in bags, and, in appearance, resembles pressed curds after they have been broken by the hand. This dry yaourt, mixed with waiter, becomes a fine cooling food or drink, of excellent service in fevers of the inflammatory or putrid kind. It seems to have none of those qualities which make milk improper in fevers. Fresh yaourt is a great article of food among the natives, and Europeans soon become fond of it.

No other acid will make the same kind of curd-: all that have been tried, after the acid fermentation is over, become putrid. In Russia they put their milk in pots in an oven, and let it stand till it becomes sour, and this they use as an article of food in that state, or make cheese of it, but it has none of the qualities of yaourt, though, when it is new, it has much of the taste. Perhaps new milk curdled with sour milk, and that again used as a ferment, and the same process continued, might, in time, acquire the qualities of yaourt, which never can be made in Turkey without some old yaourt.

They give no rational account how it was first made; some of them told me an angel taught Abraham how to make it, and others, that an angel brought a pot of it to Hagar, which was the first yaourt (or leban).

It merits attention as a delicious article of food, and as a medicine.

It seems that popularisation of yoghurt in the English-speaking world took more than three centuries from that first mention in 1625. It was still essentially unknown in the very working class post-WWII community in the North of England in which I grew up. I do not remember when I first tried yoghurt myself, or when it became part of my daily (almost) routine, but I do remember making it myself in the ‘80’s when we lived in the country with no shops nearby but a house cow which provided more milk than we could use.

Literary references suggest however that the better off and better informed in England did appreciate yoghurt before my time – although it is still surprising that the first mention of it in The Times newspaper was not until 1938, and the first of it being used in cookery not until 1961, in a brief mention of it being a good addition to briefly cooked shredded beetroot.


Quotation for the Day

I asked the waiter, 'Is this milk fresh?' He said, 'Lady, three hours ago it was grass.'
Phyllis Diller

From the Orient.

I (and my lovely daughter) are in Thailand this week. Shopping and Eating. It seems appropriate then, to give you something with an Eastern flavour.

Mrs Woolley from last week was silent on the subject of the Orient, which is not surprising for a woman born in the early seventeenth century. A hundred years later however, knowledge of the outside world was pressing in on England, and the author of  Domestic economy, and cookery, for rich and poor(1827), known at the time only as “A Lady”, had quite a comprehensive chapter on “Oriental Cookery.”

She starts by saying:

“WE are accustomed to look to the East for the origin of arts and sciences. I am not, however, inclined to ascribe the invention of cookery to Brahma or Visnu, nor do 1 feel myself so far implicated in its honour as to fall out with the heathen of old for not elevating to a niche in the Pantheon a deity that has, in these latter ages, found so many worshippers. The art of cookery; more than any other, depends upon local circumstances, as it is with the greatest difficulty communicated from one country to another, the natural productions of the soil requiring to be transported, as well as the modes of dressing them. In the early emigrations, the people must have been shepherds to abandon their native country without very great inconvenience; in their progress to husbandry and civilisation, they would adopt peculiar fashions of their own, from chance or necessity. The styles of the different nations might be thus various, though much on a par with respect to quality; and, although that of one country might surpass the rest, the others, not admitting of any general standard, could not possibly adopt it or profit by it. Travellers, while they might communicate unknown sciences, against which there could be no very rooted prejudice, or discoveries in known ones, which would be received with avidity, not only would have found it impossible to introduce improvements in this art, but would also have had to divest themselves of the deepest rooted of all prejudices. …

She then finds a recipe to illustrate her point:

“On opening Dr. Hunter's Culina accidentally, at the last page (quite in the oriental style), I was not a little pleased at finding the following admirable receipt, so different from the English style; there being some obsolete words in it, he has thus rendered it …”  

A delicious Dish,
Take good cow's milk and put it into a pot; take parsley, sage, hyssop, savory, and other good herbs; chop them and stew them in the milk; take capons, and after half roasting them, cut them in pieces, and add to them pines [pine nuts], clarified honey, and salt; colour with saffron, and serve up.

The Lady goes on to say:

“Nothing but prejudice could call any thing in this receipt disgusting. This dish is completely Turkish. The sweet herbs (the milk is in the Arab style), the saffron, the capons, the making of which is a constant practice in the East, and of which we have no trace among our nations anterior to the time of the Crusades; but, above all, the sweets, the honey, and the pine kernels, which arc richer and stronger than almonds, and must have been imported, as they never bear fruit more towards the north than the 43°, all proved to me that our travelled forefathers had not been proof against the dainties of the East. The dish I have tried, and, even without capons, I can affirm that it well merits its title.”

And then:

“But what was my surprise, on turning the page for the connexion, to read as follows: “Whoever looks into the 'Forme of Cury,' as compiled about 400 years ago, by the master cook of Richard the Second, will he highly disgusted with the dishes there recorded. Much, therefore, is due to those who have brought forward the culinary manners of the present age, in opposition to the nauseous exhibitions of former times. For example:” then follows (will the reader believe me ?) the above-mentioned ‘Delicious Dish’ ”

The author is referring to a dish (or one of a number of dishes) that are a fore-runner of our modern blancmange, or “white eat”, - one variety being called Blank Dessire or Blank de Sur, meaning “white dish from Syria”.

For to make Blank de Sur.

Take the zolyks of Eggs sodyn and temper it with the mylk of a kow and do thereto Comyn and Safron and flowr’ of ris or wasted bread myced and grynd in a morter and temper it up with the milk and make it boyle and do thereto wit of Egg corvyn smale and take fat chese and kerf ther’to wan the liquor is boyld and serve it forth.

Form of Cury, circa 1390.

A recipe for Blanc Maunger, also from the Form of Cury, is HERE.

Quotation for the Day …

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman:  subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert.  Delicately made up, not highly rouged.  Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.  Graham Kerr.

Mock Food No. 3

April 16

The very strict dietary rules decreed for hundreds of years by the Christian Church were a very powerful inspiration for fake food. At some times in history almost half the days of the year were ‘fish’ days. There were multiple and overlapping reasons for this. The prevailing idea was that ‘flesh’ food stimulated bodily heat and lust, whereas fish, which came from the water was cooling, including cooling to the passions. The fact that fish do not have an observable sex life enhanced the belief that it was more suitable for times of religious observance when distracting thoughts were best kept to a minimum – and for those in religious orders, that meant all the time.

There were economic and political reasons too: encouraging fish consumption preserved livestock on the land, and encouraging the fishing industry meant the availability of a large cohort of men with sailing experience who could then be sent on voyages of discovery or used to supply the Navy.

The proscriptions led to the invention of some wonderful fish dishes, and some artful substitutes for meat, but the best fake food was invented for Lent. During Lent, all animal products were forbidden. Essentially it was a vegan diet, although the word was not coined until very recent times.

No milk, no butter, no eggs. What to do?

Make almond milk, that was step number one. Huge amounts of it were made in medieval times, and the mind boggles at the work involved in pounding vast quantities of almonds without the assistance of food processors – but kitchen labour was cheap in those days, I suppose.

Eggs? No problem. The following recipe is taken from the Harleian MS (circa 1430). It is difficult to follow, but essentially says to ‘blow’ the eggs (pinhole each end and … blow the contents out) then re-fill it with a ground almond mixture, half of which is coloured yellow with saffron (and cinnamon) and placed in the middle to mimic the yolk.

Eyroun in lentyn [Eggs in Lent].
Take Eyroun, & blow owt þat ys with-ynne atte oþer ende; þan waysshe þe schulle clene in warme Water; þan take gode mylke of Almaundys, & sette it on þe fyre; þan take a fayre canvas, & pore þe mylke þer-on, & lat renne owt þe water; þen take it owt on þe cloþe, & gader it to-gedere with a platere; þen putte sugre y-now þer-to; þan take þe halvyndele, & colour it with Safroun, a lytil, & do þer-to pouder Canelle; þan take & do of þe whyte in the neþer ende of þe schulle, & in þe myddel þe ȝolk, & fylle it vppe with þe whyte; but noȝt to fulle, for goyng ouer; þan sette it in þe fyre & roste it, & serue forth.

Butter? Almonds again to the rescue. The following recipe is from a Neopolitan recipe collection, Cuoco Napoletano, via Terence Scully’s excellent translation.

Butiro Contrafata.
Get a pound and a half of blanched, well ground almonds; get half a beaker of good rosewater and strain the almonds - if that rosewater is not enough, use however much you need so that the amount of almonds can be strained; then, so the almond milk will bind well, get a little starch, a little saffron if you want, and fine sugar, and lay this mixture into a mold as if were butter; like that it is good to eat.
[Scully, Terence. Cuoco Napoletano. The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: A Critical Edition and English Translation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000].

Tomorrow’s Story …

Mock Food No. 4

Quotation for the Day …

Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from Romeo and Juliet.

Milk and Custard.

November 16 …

I saw a pseudo-historic article recently that referred to the “white meat” eaten by the peasants of a few hundred years ago – because they were too poor to own cows but could afford chickens. Well, I have news for that writer. Egg-producers (and I mean chickens, not chicken farmers) were also too valuable to eat until they died of old age. The “white meats” referred to meant milk, butter, cheese. They were the food of rural folk, and for a long time were considered too lowly for the rich. Lard was preferred in England for cooking purposes throughout medieval times, probably because its value was perceived as greater because the animal had to be killed to get it, and there were good reasons for eschewing milk in the cities. No refrigeration meant that any but a very short distance to from the cow and you got sour milk (and often adulterated or diluted milk.) One partial solution was to drink boiled milk, which was considered to have medicinal value. In his ‘secret diary’, William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, he frequently mentions having boiled milk for breakfast. On this day in 1711 he wrote:

“I rose about 7 o'clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Homer. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast…. About 2 o'clock we dined at Marot's and I ate some fish for dinner. ..About 4 o'clock Jimmy Burwell and I resolved to go to the wedding at Mr. Ingles' and went away in his coach and found all the company ready to go to supper but we ate nothing with them but some custard.”

Ahh! Custard. What a great way to have your boiled milk. Custard is not what it used to be: the word comes from crustade (croustade) and – as it sounds – refers to a crust. In other words, custard used to be a pie (or a tart, if you will). The OED says that custard is “formerly, a kind of open pie containing pieces of meat or fruit covered with a preparation of broth or milk, thickened with eggs, sweetened, and seasoned with spices …now a dish made with eggs beaten up and mixed with milk to a stiff consistency, sweetened, and baked; also a similar preparation served in a liquid form.

Custard is a great way to get your boiled milk and your eggs too. It sounds like the perfect breakfast food. Why don’t we have custard for breakfast?

The other way to get your other white meats is in puddings. Here are two from Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People (1854)

Curd Milk Pudding.
Put in a basin three eggs, a little grated lemon-peel, three ounces of currants, one pint of curds, and one pound of bread-crumbs; boil in a cloth half an hour; turn out and serve.

Cocoa Nut Pudding.
Grate half a nut, add another egg to the milk, mix with the above. An ounce of flour may be added.

Monday’s Story …

Pudding or Pie?

Quotation for the Day …

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast,1943.