[Sca-cooks] Milk and cream (was Re: I Didn't Know...
Pixel, Goddess and Queen
pixel at hundred-acre-wood.com
Fri Sep 7 09:47:37 PDT 2007
Well, continuing the milk discussion, modern milk is usually from
Holstein-Frisians. These cows have been bred to produce large volumes of
milk, and their milk has a fairly low milkfat content compared to the much
smaller volume of milk you get from, for example, a Jersey cow. For
instance. When my uncle was a dairy cow inspector in WI, there was a
running joke amongst the farmers who raised Jerseys that they were going
to get a Holstein "to wash out the buckets".
My aunt and uncle had two Jersey cows, so milk production and
processing was pretty much the way it was done in SCA period--hand
milking, and then you let the milk sit to cool and separate, then skimmed
off the cream layer. Even after the milk was skimmed as completely as one
could manage with hand tools, it was still much richer than even the whole
milk one buys in the store. You needed to shake the bottle a little if it
had been sitting for any length of time, as it would continue to separate.
As does cream--I buy non-UHP cream, and if I let it sit in the fridge too
long it becomes solid cream and whey.
YIS,
Margaret FitzWilliam
On Fri, 7 Sep 2007, Elise Fleming wrote:
> Greetings! I was just reading the tudorcook blog page and saw this:
>
>> ......not because of anything he did, more the fact that milk today is
>> separated from cream in a different manner to the Tudors. Today,
>> our milk and cream are separated centrifugally, in the past good old
>> gravity did the job....so what you say...well, our milk today has less
>> fat in it than in the past and our cream more fat. This meant that when
>> Robin came to curdle the milk to make a possett..make a styf poshotte
>> of Ale; þan hang þe croddys þer-of in a pynne all he got was a few
>> measly lumps floating in a lot of milk/whey.......my fault really as I
> should
>> have ordered cream to mix with the milk to up the fat levels......
>
> I never knew about a difference in separation - only that we homogenize
> most of our milk today. I wonder what else is different today that would
> make a big difference in the results of our cookery...
>
> Alys Katharine
> Elise Fleming
> alysk at ix.netcom.com
> http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/
>
>
>
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list