SC - way WAY off topic, but interesting indeed..

[Kimib2@aol.com]

Terry Nutter wrote:

> Hi, Katerine here.  Snipping from Aiofe's response to Adamantius:
>
> >For that matter, who says that our cream was the consistency of their cream,
>
> I, for one, am middling certain it wasn't.  Modern cream is homogenized,
> which affects consistency.  It is also thinnned down to legally acceptable
> levels.  In fact, modern cream isn't much thicker than the stuff that
> rose to the top of milk bottles we got in England 35 years ago -- and
> that was milk from which much of the cream had already been removed.
>
> I suspect that raw cream carefully extracted from fresh raw milk is *much*
> heavier than the heaviest you can buy at the supermarket.  Modern dairies
> economize by giving us much weaker stuff.  I also suspect that homogenization
> affects the readiness of cream to clot.

[snipped]
Right you are!  I used to raise Nubian dairy goats milking as high as 5-6%
butterfat.  Now goats milk does not seperate as easily as cow's milk [with cow
only a few hours and you can see a 'cream'line, goats more like 2-3 days and
depends on diet and butterfat %]  Even at that what I skimmed off was certainly
thicker than the stuff you buy now a days, so I'd hunt somebody up with dairy
animals [cows, goats or sheep!] and try the real thing!  Also, keep in mind that
very real possibility that in a house without a lot of sanitation there was
probably lots of bacteria floating around already beginning to clot the cream.....

cheers, Mairi

lamenting a broken computer for 5 days and now reading 600+ e-mails received when
we logged back on ......

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