Tamasin Day-Lewis is spot on in her Saveur piece on tea sandwiches.  The always wry and informative Old Foodie pondering  why cucumber sandwiches?  My response on how to make cucumber sandwiches that the Old Foodie kindly posted on her blog some years ago. Me on the sequence of English farmhouse meals in the 1950s, on an attempt to replicate Sunday tea in Guanajuato, on what teas were and the fact that they have vanished, and on bread and the problems of getting the right kind.

And finally, Sunday tea at my grandparents.  And no this was not upstairs, downstairs, no crowds of servants, my grandmother made the food and my mother or one of us children were sent to make the tea.

Tea was important when I was growing up in England, and nowhere more so than in my grandparent’s farm house. You can see it in the photo above taken in very early spring, everything still dun brown and grey green. The village street and front garden are hidden by the curve of the hill. The front of the house was added in the eighteenth century, the working part at the back went back hundreds of years before that. That’s the background. Now to tea.

Tea began with water. Water was the topic of much conversation in the family. Most of the the various aunts and uncles had their own springs for their farm houses. We did too for our farm house. These produced gorgeous, gorgeous water. But my grandparents had a problem. Mains water had come to the village and with its added chemicals it was deemed to be quite inadequate for drinking.  So they had had a well dug and an electric pump installed.

So step one in making tea was to turn on the small electric pump attached to one side of the old porcelain kitchen sink that looked out over the back farm yard. After a few gurgles, clear, fresh well water began to trickle out to be collected in the kettle. This took a while. The big kettle was put on the AGA to heat. This took a while too, partly because so much water was needed, partly because the well water was icy cold.

Step two while all this was going on was to assemble the tea equipment: large brown tea pot, tea cozy, water jug for topping up the tea pot, strainer for collecting tea leaves, slops bowl for throwing out tea dregs, sugar bowl, and milk jug.

Step three means backing up a bit. Milk was another problem. Not its availability. My grandparents always had at least a hundred cows in milk. But they were now all Friesians (Holsteins) because the British Milk Marketing Board paid by volume not fat content.

Well, now, we couldn’t drink that kind of milk, could we? So my grandparents had a dear little Channel Island cow that gave the most glorious rich milk. It was a bit of an indulgence, I realize in retrospect. An “old chap,” one of the farm workers who was now past heavy work, had to milk her by hand morning and evening. What the cost per pint can have been I cannot even imagine. At the time, though, she was a friend, to be greeted when she was walked up the village street, her big dreamy eyes, her slobbery tongue and muzzle, her black fringed ears.

By now the kettle was boiling.  The tea pot was rinsed out with boiling water to warm the pot. Then the tea caddies were taken down from the shelf over the AGA. My grandparents bought a selection of different teas from Stokes the grocer in the town three miles away. Depending on their preference for the day, different proportions were spooned from different caddies in a flat caddy spoon and added to the pot. Then came the boiling water, and water for the water pot too, and tea cozies to keep them warm.

Then the whole equipage was carried up the couple of steps to the breakfast room (they ate almost all meals in the breakfast room because the dining room filled up with farm paperwork).

We children sat on the bench under the endlessly fascinating prints of the Grand National showing horses falling about all over the place, and facing the fire on the other side of the room and the two miniature barrels one of port and one of brandy that we never got to touch. My grandmother sat at one end, everyone else sat in Windsor chairs around the table, never less than a dozen or so.

There was bread (and that was an even bigger story than water) and butter (hand churned from Channel Island milk), and scones (little flaky rounds, not the great dense hunks that now go by that name) with raspberry jam from the kitchen garden and clotted cream (thank you cow), and Victoria sponges. They had to wait.

With great ceremony, and much asking of preferences for milk and sugar, my grandmother poured tea into angular blue and white tea cups. Those who took milk got Channel Island milk. Not ideal even then, in my opinion. Thick gobs of cream rose to the surface, making it almost like a tea-flavored dessert. Once I had learned to drink it without milk it was clear and astringent and glorious.

Only then began the elaborate ritual of handing around the eatables, and we were expected to sit, and eat, and listen, and no getting up from the table.

Why tell this story? Nostalgia, of course. The fact that English farmhouse teas of the kind I assumed happened every Sunday without fail have yet to find their chronicler. The fact that stories like this show that just perhaps Elizabeth David is not the last word on how bad English food was. The fact that this quality of eating (and I know that high quality eating is usually located with dinner not other meals, but be that as it may) is not necessarily open. Only the rare visitor to England would ever have known that such teas existed, let alone be invited to participate. The fact that such quality is not  democratic, that it may mean pretty ghastly economic and social distinctions. The “old chap” for example did not eat like this. For all those reasons.

Cow Parade Lala ‘pastarán’ en León, originally uploaded by RightIndex.

Food entrepreneurship is alive and well in Mexico. I am constantly amazed by the small start ups selling fruit cakes or home made flour tortillas or typical sweets or fruit liqueurs or crepes or cookies or, in this case, cheese. Penajamo, a small municipality (county roughly) in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico has no less than four small cooperatives making goat cheese.

Now goat cheese is new to Mexico and is still far from being as well known and liked as it is in the United States, say. And Pénjamo is a center of big agriculture and meat processing plants. So how in the world did artisanal goat cheese making get under way.

At the Expigua livestock show in Irapuato last month, María Carmen and her niece Susanna who were demonstrating the products of the Joya de Lobos coop, explained.

About a decade ago, the parish priest somehow made contact with the Secretario de Desarrollo Económico y Turismo and with the French Embassy in Mexico City. As a result a French woman by the name of Solange Manier turned up in Pénjamo and spent several month teaching goat cheese making. Then she left and there’s been no further contact as far as I can tell. This, and other stories I heard, raise echoes of the mythic origins of many European cheeses, something I’ll talk about in another post.

Now they milk twice a day, refrigerating the evening’s milk for the following morning. Then they pasteurize the milk, coagulate it, wait twenty four hours, and mold it, and the fresh cheese is ready twenty four hours later. Apart from natural, they turn out cheeses rolled in ash, red pepper (pimiento), sesame, pecan, and one flavored with chipotle (very mildly flavored). They also make an aged cheese.

Their products are whisked off to Mexico City on the Flecha Amarilla bus line–much cheaper than using one of the messenger services. There they go to prestige restaurants (Águila y Sol, Ginos, Au Pied de Cochon), hotels (El Marquis, Fiesta Americana, Intercontinental) and organic stores (The Green Corner) and El Museo de Queso.

Cost: MN$25 for 200 grams (about US$2.50 for 4 ounces).

Another group.

If you’re interested in visiting, Joya de Lobos is at Matamorros 37-C, Col.Centro, Pénjamo, Guanajuato. The phone in Mexico is 469 692 3517 or Cel. 044 469 100 1419. Agustín and María Elena Gutiérrez are the proprietors. They can point you to other makers. Combine this with a visit to the pyramids, to the two Guanajuato tequila makers close to town, and to the birthplace of Padre Hidalgo, one of the leaders of the Mexican independence movement, and you have a lovely day.

The only milk available was not just pasteurized but homogenized and had Vitamin D added as well. No lovely layer of cream rose to the top. The cheese came in foil or plastic packs. Butter was outweighed by margarine twenty to one. Cream was thin and oily and had to be semi-frozen before it could be whipped.

How could the richest country in the world tolerate such stuff? I cut a panel off the side of a milk carton and sent it to my English dairy farmer father.

True, some things have improved since then, particularly if you search. You can get some decent cheese. Ditto yogurt. But it’s still the case that gums hold cream cheese and yogurt together, that you have to hunt down plain yogurt, that cream that has not been ultra-pasteurized is a rarity, and that–amazing–whole milk is a sign of a neighborhood in serious need of gentrification.  In the average grocery store, it’s still slim pickings.

Now milk and milk products have found their advocate in the form of Anne Mendelson. Today is the official publication date of her book, Milk, published by Knopf. Anne Mendelson will be known to many of you. She’s the author of the incisive biography of America’s most famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. And she writes informative, generous cook book reviews for pubications such as Gourmet and the New York Times, the kind of reviews that actually move discussion of the topic at hand to a new level.

I should probably say that I was the recipient of one of those kind reviews. And that since then Anne and I have sat together, usually on benches it seems for some odd reason, to chat about milk and Milton and many other matters. I like to think, though, that I am not unreasonably swayed by all this.

Because whether Anne is known to you or not, you’re in for a treat with Milk. It’s as delightfully written as everything she publishes while not pulling punches, condescending, or dodging tough issues. She has many sub-themes that I shall return to later: clear explanations of complicated food science of milk; good sense on the virtuous food camp’s ideas about raw and organic milk; and provocative claims about milk’s historical geography among others. I’ll be returning to some of these themes over the next few weeks.

But running through the book is a single thread. We need to recover a huge heritage milky delights. We’ve been led astray by the emphasis on milk as a drink and milk as a source of hard cheese. Both are fine but they are a recent by-way in the long distinguished history of milk products. She wants to re-introduce us to all the lightly fermented yogurts, buttermilks, and fresh cheeses, to real butter and cream, to the boiled down milk products of India and Latin America.

To illustrate this she has all kinds of recipes all of which she has obviously tried in her own kitchen. Some are for classics-béchamel, hot chocolate, rice pudding. Some are a little more unusual-ají de leche, hoppelpoppel, buttermilk-caraway soup. And some ease the reader into new adventures. Look at this.

“Fresh white cheese: Kindergarten version

Go buy a cardboard carton–two, if you’re game–of cultured buttermilk. It should be made without salt or gummy stabilizers, and preferably should have a milkfat content of at least 1.5 percent. Place the unopened carton)s) in a deep pot such as a stockpot or asparagus steam and add enough cold water to come close to the top of the cartons. Bring the water to a full boil over high heat. Remove the pot from the heat and let the whole thing cool to room temperature.

Open the carton’s and dump the contents into [a cloth-lined] colander. [Then tie the cloth with a string and hand to drip]. When the whey stops dripping, turn out the drained curd into a bowl and briefly work it with a wooden spoon. Work in a pinch or two of salt and a dash of cream, if desired. Store in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for three or four days, and use in any way you would use commercial cottage or pot cheese.”

Enticing.

A book to treasure.

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/10/lets-take-back-the-world-of-milk-lead-on-anne-mendelson.html/feed 2 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/bee-wilson-on-milk-and-food-safety.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/bee-wilson-on-milk-and-food-safety.html#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:56:19 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=578 Bee Wilson brings a historian’s eye to the problem of the adulteration of milk in China in an op-ed in the New York Times. It’s based on research she did for her most recent book, Swindled, which is a very readable and and well-researched introduction to food frauds in Europe and the United States over the past couple of hundred years.

(By the way, for those of you who don’t know Bee’s work, look out for her column in the Telegraph. Here’s a recent column on hospital food).

Food safety is something that is incredibly hard to ensure demanding constant vigilance. We’ll never be able to achieve total safety in food or in any other area of life.  The question we all have to ask is how we balance increasing cost (which vigilance necessarily means) against safety.  So how much are we willing to spend?  How do we as societies deal with the fact that some of us are more averse to risk than others?  All very difficult questions.

And if you’re a bit confused about milk sweets, think of cajeta (dulce de leche) which is a fairly liquid form. Boil the milk down further and you will get fudgy solids.

Assume the cows on these farms give 750 gallons a year which was normal in Britain in the 50s (though I suspect they give less). That’s 2 gallons a day so that to get this amount of milk you’d need 50 cows in milk. So each of six dairies has 8-10 cows in milk, about what I’ve seen driving around. This more or less rules out milking machines.

According to Dr Fernando Cervantes of Chapingo, one third of all milk in Mexico comes from small family operation that have almost one a half million cows. This is the major income for 100,000 families, he reckons.

The milk being delivered to the cheese maker was warm, raw milk.  Lots of people in my neighborhood also buy warm, raw milk.

You can just see the milkman heaving his can out of his pick up.  He delivers with that one can and a smaller one.  And yes, the hill is that steep.  And no, it’s not usually that green.

The big commercial dairies (LaLa, Leche León, etc) want chilled milk, quite understandably. What is to be done? The ag research people are trying to encourage cooperatives so that farmers can buy chilling equipment.

All this would be heaven for the growing band of raw milk enthusiasts in the States.  Here, though, it’s a question of what a family with half a dozen cows is to do to keep up with the market.

Even if you don’t understand Spanish you can see the essential step: hot water being poured over the curd so as to produce the long strings.  And you’ll links to lots of other Mexican cheese-making techniques. Great stuff.  Thanks for finding it Alex.

The main narrator, Abraham Villegas, also mentions that many artificial cheeses are also being made.  Mexico, like many parts of the world, has a milk shortage.  That makes cheese expensive for a lot of people.  Yesterday when I was in Mega, I counted and I reckon that more than half the cheese there was non-milk cheese, artificial cheese.  Here’s an example.

And here’s the list of ingredients: water, vegetable fat, milk protein, etc.  (Stupidly I threw away the grocery receipt so I don’t have relative prices. But I’ll check next time I go).

And I have to admit that the taste difference between this and an all milk cheese from the always-reliable firm Aguascalientes was less than I expected.

So next time you have a queso fundido (melted cheese) that seems incredibly reasonable in price, it may well be artificial cheese.

Meanwhile, those who want a wet, fresh, Italian-style mozzarella can pick up this.  From Wisconsin, need I say? About $4.00 for about half a pound).

I’m still mulling this over. In and of itself it’s perhaps not so important. But I see these puzzles as case studies in how we get straight about the history of food, in how we can bring to bear different lines of evidence.

I have been much helped by three items. Two emails off list from MexicoBob including extracts from web pages on queso oaxaca and an article whose title (in translation) is Two Famous String Cheeses: The Oaxacan and Mozzarella (2004) by Abraham Villegas de Gante at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, Mexico’s main agricultural university. Here’s what I learned from Bob in bullet form.

• “That’s more tangled than a Oaxacan cheese” is a Mexican saying. Thanks Bob for this apposite addition to my Spanish! What a great expression.
• That there are legends saying that in 1885 a 14-year old named Leobarda Castellanos Garcia invented queso Oaxaca by accident when having let the coagulated milk pass the point for making cheese she tipped hot water over it and accidentally made the gummy mass that was the basis for a new cheese.
• That Oaxacans celebrate Reyes Etla as the cradle (birthplace) of cheese.
• That elderly Mexicans remember queso Oaxaca from before the 1950s.

And from Abraham Villegas (apart from lots of lovely technical details)

• That Oaxaca cheese is not the only string cheese in Mexico. There’s also asadero, guaje (from the mountains of Potosi) and trenzado or plaited (from Veracruz).
• That artisanal Oaxaca cheese is made by methods essentially identical to artisanal mozzarella while mass produced Oaxaca (or I suspect asadero) is made by methods essentially identical to industrial (sometimes called American) mozzarella.
• That the preferred cows in Mexico are a cebu-Swiss brown mix used for meat as well as milk and grazed not kept in a barn (though presumably with hay, alfalfa or other extras in the dry months).
• That mozzarella-type cheese production began climbing world wide in the 70s with the growing popularity of pizza.
• That milk-based mozzarella is threatened by artificial mozzarella.

So what do I conclude?

I’d still suspect queso Oaxaca and the other string cheeses are relatively recent additions to Mexican cheese making. The tricky technique and the fact that is so similar to the Italian, the fact that Mexico is not great dairying country, that the “Texas” longhorns that I think were the main cattle here weren’t ideal dairy animals, that it’s unlikely that cebu and Swiss browns were introduced until twentieth century, that it’s not clear that there was a big role for melted cheese (the main use of Oaxaca cheese) in traditional Mexican cooking, all suggest at least a twentieth century origin.

The accidental discovery story I discount. these make my historian of technology hairs stand on end. They’re hard to disprove but evidence almost always counts against them.

The fact that the elderly remember queso oaxaca from before the 50s I give more credence though memories being what they are (and everyone who has done oral history has stories to tell) I don’t count it as fact beyond a reasonable doubt.

So maybe earlier than the 1950s. But highly unlikely the technique was independently invented. Propelled along by quesadillas, pizza, queso fundido and the like. And I’d still guess brought by Italians.

Coming next in this continuing investigation (and for its intrinsic interest as well): a wonderful forthcoming book by Anne Mendelson on milk.

First, let’s be clear about cheese. If you define cheese as the aged cheeses typical of Europe, then you are talking about a pretty odd culinary foodstuff in world terms. Basically the only places make these cheeses are European countries and their overseas colonies or former colonies, usually in the temperate zones where cattle flourish. Ripened cheese seems so prominent now because of European expansion. But fresh cheeses are much, much commoner in most times and places.

Second, like Adam Balic, I’m inclined to discount the lactose intolerance theory, plausible as it seems at first sight. Partly for the same reasons, namely that most people can tolerate fermented milk products. (The consumption of fresh milk is a very odd Western habit and even in the West it’s really only become common in the last hundred years since pasteurization made it safer).

Partly because many populations of the lactose intolerant (a) happily consumed milk products in the past. And (b) are increasingly consuming them today, even in the form of milk, thanks to the spread of those odd western ideas about consuming fresh milk. China had lots of dairy foods in the Middle Ages. And the Chinese now have some of the biggest dairies in the world.

Third, one factor that seems to be important in India is religion. The historical data are not entirely clear (well that’s one huge understatement). But just two examples.

K. T. Achaya, the great expert on the history of Indian food, suggests Indian traditions going back to the Rig Vedas that found cutting milk with acids (presumably as opposed to allowing natural bacterial fermentation to make yogurt-like curd) was unacceptable for theological reasons.  I think the idea was that milk was such a holy and precious substance that it should not be treated this roughly.

What does seem to be the case is that paneer and chhana, the two fresh cheeses that crop up in India, were introduced by the Portuguese who arrived in India in the 16th century. They “cut” milk with citrus juice and, it is said, Indians in the north east of the country picked up the habit. This says Achaya “lifted the Aryan taboo on deliberate milk curdling.” He cites an article by Arindam Nag that I have not seen: “A Milk Curdling Tale,” Society (Bombay, February 1989), 33.

Indian Buddhists, too, hallowed milk products. They took their methods of making curd or yogurt and probably ghee too to China and from there to Japan between say 200 AD and 800 AD. I’d take a bet that Koreans also ate them at that stage (to respond to other comments in the discussion). Then for various reasons China and Japan (and if I’m right Korea too) backed away from milk products.

I’ll leave other factors affecting the distribution of cheese for another post.