[Sca-cooks] Milk and cream (was Re: I Didn't Know...

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

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/
>
>
>