Cowcheese 2

  Yesterday you found out that the juice of freshly squeezed cow is milk. Before it gets to us, various things happen including the fat being allowed to float to the surface before being skimmed off, (of which more later), and pasteurisation, the heating process which kills off some bacteria which can make raw milk dangerous. I say, 'can' because there's not necessarily anything wrong with raw milk and it's often for sale in farmers markets and the like.

  The creamy, fat-rich part of the milk which is skimmed off is, err, cream but has other uses too, most notably butter. To get into the history of the stuff, we need to know how how we get from cream to butter. For the record though, it is possible to make butter directly from milk, as would have been the case thousands of years ago, but if you want to make it at home, it's easiest using cream.

  Have you ever whipped cream? And have you ever over-whipped cream? You'll know if you have pretty quickly because it goes from the fluffy, silky smooth stage to looking broken and crumbly like a drag queen's make up after fifteen hours of hard partying. At the bottom of the bowl there's a thin, watery liquid as a final taunt that you've fucked it up and need to start again. However, if you ignore that and keep whipping for a few more minutes, the broken cream transforms into butter. Basically the fat kind of sticks into a big lump that is butter, while the water just drops away.

  Picture the scene. It's about five and a half thousand years ago in central Asia and some nomad's riding a yak, camel, horse, ostrich or whatever and they've got a pouch full of nice creamy milk. With the constant rolling and jostling of their ride, the contents of the pouch is getting a good old shaking and before they know it the inevitable happens.

 Butter spread, (excuse the pun), all over very quickly and it wasn't long before all sorts of churning contraptions started appearing that gave the milk a good old rattling. Salt was originally added to help with preservation as fridge invention was a while off, and it was thousands of years, (in the eighteen hundreds), before the process was really industrialised with the invention of the first mechanical cream separator. (The separation is done centrifugally instead of waiting for the cream to rise).

​​​​​​​  Incidentally, the ancient Greeks and Romans were slow to adopt butter, preferring oil, yet it is their names for the stuff, (buturon and butyrum), which have stuck and given us the name, butter. The translation of their names for butter is  'cow cheese'.

  

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com