[Sca-cooks] coconut milk and rice milk

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Sharon R. Saroff:
>I have a cooking competition coming up and I am interested in 
>knowing how period coconut and rice milks are.  I have seen coconut 
>milk as an ingredient in Indian recipes and occasionally in middle 
>eastern recipes.  I need a substitute for yogurt because my personna 
>would not use it in the same recipe as meat.  I have come up dry on 
>my sources at home so far.

I assume (rightly or wrongly) we're delving into period Kashrut? If 
so, are we talking about European or Middle Eastern Judaic practices?

As Doc suggested, almond milk turns up in an amazing number of 
European recipes as a substitute for milk, cream, and even eggs. It 
does, however, lack the tang of yogurt. Even the couple of European 
recipes that curdle the almond milk using vinegar don't give a 
sour-tasting final product. But then, almond milk is also used in 
some Persian and Mughal Indian recipes even today.

I suspect the reason why coconut milk and rice milk never took off in 
Europe (until, arguably, today) is because the former doesn't keep as 
well as almond milk (coconut can get rancid fairly easily), and that 
that niche can easily be filled by a more local product, even 
assuming almonds aren't local to, say, Yorkshire, and for the latter, 
again, there were more easily available substitutes.

To substitute for the tang of yogurt as it is used in places like 
India, but without a dairy product, it seems like places like 
tropical SE Asia (where you sometimes find obviously Indian-inspired 
cookery, but in a non-dairy form, places like Myanmar), citrus juices 
like lime play a large role, sometimes even in dishes with similar 
names to their Indian counterparts using yogurt.

I guess we'd need a little more info about exactly what you're trying 
to accomplish.

Adamantius