SC - medieval milk

[Stefan li Rous]

Anne-Marie asks:
>Now, back to medieval food stuff...do you guys think that modern grocery
store milk is anything like real medieval milk? Why or why not? And if not,
how can we approximate the real deal? Or do we care?<

In reading Waverly Root's "Food", I note he comments:
The medieval world used little milk, partly because medieval cows did
well to produce enough of it in a week to make a pound of butter. England
had more milk than most other countries, and referred to it as "white
meat".

Perhaps this would account for the scarcity of butter mentioned in some
cookbooks mentioned here earlier.

He also backs up some of what others have said here in "Alas, every
'improvement' which has been effected in the handling of milk has been
paid for by a deterioration of its taste-even in the case of 
pasteurization...." "One may ask oneself wistfully whether, if the
tuberculin test had come in twenty years before pasteurization instead 
of the other way around, we would not be drinking tastier milk today"

And more unusually:
"In the Middle Ages children were sometimes put to suckle a sow, and
vice versa; I have seen an old engraving showing a woman giving one
breast to her child and the other to a piglet."

Lord Stefan li Rous
Ansteorra
stefan at texas.net
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