The bread and butter (and cheese) of civilization
Have you ever made bread before? How about butter? Now for the big question: Have you ever made cheese? Or did you think these things were way too hard to make from scratch?
Well, these are things our great-great-grandmas made all the time, and they made them without benefit of modern kitchens. They made them in log cabins and they had to build a big wood fire in their chimney with no temperature gauges or timers. Heck, at one time goat herders made cheese in their yurts, using such advanced cooking equipment as animal stomachs tied to the sides of their camels. So if you have an actual kitchen and a set of wooden spoons, you're way ahead of the game already. I will not be explaining the camel method today, I'm sorry to say. My camel got a better offer from R.J. Reynolds. We'll have to work around that.
Bread used to be called the staff of life. The Lord's Prayer asks, "Give us this day our daily bread." It doesn't say "Give us this day our paleo-approved kale." Until recently, bread was one of the main things we lived on. It was a bedrock of civilization, because you virtually cannot make bread without a home and hearth. Bread implies you've settled down. You're not a hunter-gatherer anymore. You have permanent settlements. You don't have to move constantly, following the animal herds. You can stay in one place. You can build cities. What allowed people to do that? Grain. For Western Europeans, it was wheat made into bread. Other civilizations sprang up around other grains -- like rice for Asians. The only civilization in North America was based on corn. Without freezers and canned goods, you need to store enough food to maintain civilization throughout the seasons in one location. You can dry meat and berries. If you live near the sea, you can salt fish. But grain offered some advantages in that you could grow vast quantities of it, dry it, and store it for more than a year. If you've got a big store of dried grain, you no longer have to devote all your people's time to going out every day hoping to bag a wildebeest or find enough berries to feed everyone. What did people do with all the extra time? They developed written languages, and literature, and science, and art -- in a word, civilization.
This isn't to say you need to eat bread every day. Kale is pretty darned good, too. But there's something about baking a loaf of bread that makes me feel connected to all the people who came before me.
Not all our adult ancestors drank milk. If you have Native American, Asian or African roots, you may not even be able to digest dairy products, because most of your ancestors didn't keep cows, goats, water buffalo, etc. 100 percent of our ancestors drank milk. They drank their mother's milk, and archeological records show that our ancient grandmothers nursed their children until they were about 7. This was necessary, because without a reliable source of protein, brain development would be affected during famine. But if a child still had some breast milk available, that child was still getting some nutrition. It's awfully hard to get enough protein and nourishment from the hunter-gatherer diet when you're a small child with a small stomach. A lot of those foods are difficult to digest, so extended nursing provided a healthy base until the child's brain had largely matured, and until he or she could transition to the adult diet. They didn't have grains, remember. So when agriculture developed to the point of having grains and, in some cases, some kind of animal milk, all of a sudden women didn't need to nurse seven years. The weaning age dropped to about 3 or 4 at that point. That meant women could have many more children. Their fertility would return and their families were larger, and those civilizations thus grew much faster.
But milk doesn't do well just sitting out for days at a time. And cows don't give milk all year-round, only after birthing a calf. Not having refrigerators in their yurt or cabin or hut, they had to preserve the milk somehow, and of course we know how they did it. For the short-term, there were cultured products like yogurt and kefir. For longer periods, there was cheese. You could keep the cheese and have some protein available year-round.
Incidentally, a family with a milk cow didn't just benefit from milk and dairy to eat. The cow also produced high-quality fertilizer that made their farm much more productive. The synergy involved was just perfect.
I don't have a cow and you probably don't either. If I want to fertilize my garden, I have to go buy a bag of fertilizer. I can't just scoop it out of Bessie's stall. I am not trying to romanticize the old ways, but I do think it's good to remember them, and to honor them. Also, the bread and milk and cheese and butter you make at home is going to taste so good that you're going to consider, just for a minute, getting an acre and a cow. But then you're probably going to remember that you don't really enjoy getting up at 5 a.m. to milk cows and scoop up cow poop, and, like me, you'll settle for making your bread and milk and cheese from ingredients you hunted and gathered at the grocery store.
The bread I'm talking about here is going to be white bread, because it's easier for beginners. Whole-grain baking is an art unto itself, and one worth learning, in my opinion, because whole grains are much healthier. But that's another project.
The best cheese to start with is mozzarella, because it's quick and easy. You can be gorging yourself on its incredibly warm cheesy goodness in less than half an hour, whereas some cheeses have to be aged for months, which would make for a pretty long project.
Butter is easy as heck. You can use a butter churn or a mixer or you can just shake it in a container. If you want to develop your arm muscles, use the manual method. If you just want to get the stuff made fast, use a mixer. It turns into whipped cream before it turns into butter. If you want to dip your finger in at that stage, or even take out a portion to enjoy separately, go right ahead. You almost can't mess up butter. You'll have to press out the liquid and gather all the fat together. You can do this with a spoon, pressing the globs of fat against the side of the container. What is left is buttermilk, and it's sweet to drink. It isn't the buttermilk you find in the store, though. That's a cultured dairy product made much the same way as yogurt is made -- in both cases you stir a bit of the last batch (of yogurt or buttermilk) into milk, and letting it set out until thickened. That's a whole other process, and pretty easy, but a whole other project.
Interested? Read on! Recipes to follow.
Well, these are things our great-great-grandmas made all the time, and they made them without benefit of modern kitchens. They made them in log cabins and they had to build a big wood fire in their chimney with no temperature gauges or timers. Heck, at one time goat herders made cheese in their yurts, using such advanced cooking equipment as animal stomachs tied to the sides of their camels. So if you have an actual kitchen and a set of wooden spoons, you're way ahead of the game already. I will not be explaining the camel method today, I'm sorry to say. My camel got a better offer from R.J. Reynolds. We'll have to work around that.
Bread used to be called the staff of life. The Lord's Prayer asks, "Give us this day our daily bread." It doesn't say "Give us this day our paleo-approved kale." Until recently, bread was one of the main things we lived on. It was a bedrock of civilization, because you virtually cannot make bread without a home and hearth. Bread implies you've settled down. You're not a hunter-gatherer anymore. You have permanent settlements. You don't have to move constantly, following the animal herds. You can stay in one place. You can build cities. What allowed people to do that? Grain. For Western Europeans, it was wheat made into bread. Other civilizations sprang up around other grains -- like rice for Asians. The only civilization in North America was based on corn. Without freezers and canned goods, you need to store enough food to maintain civilization throughout the seasons in one location. You can dry meat and berries. If you live near the sea, you can salt fish. But grain offered some advantages in that you could grow vast quantities of it, dry it, and store it for more than a year. If you've got a big store of dried grain, you no longer have to devote all your people's time to going out every day hoping to bag a wildebeest or find enough berries to feed everyone. What did people do with all the extra time? They developed written languages, and literature, and science, and art -- in a word, civilization.
This isn't to say you need to eat bread every day. Kale is pretty darned good, too. But there's something about baking a loaf of bread that makes me feel connected to all the people who came before me.
Not all our adult ancestors drank milk. If you have Native American, Asian or African roots, you may not even be able to digest dairy products, because most of your ancestors didn't keep cows, goats, water buffalo, etc. 100 percent of our ancestors drank milk. They drank their mother's milk, and archeological records show that our ancient grandmothers nursed their children until they were about 7. This was necessary, because without a reliable source of protein, brain development would be affected during famine. But if a child still had some breast milk available, that child was still getting some nutrition. It's awfully hard to get enough protein and nourishment from the hunter-gatherer diet when you're a small child with a small stomach. A lot of those foods are difficult to digest, so extended nursing provided a healthy base until the child's brain had largely matured, and until he or she could transition to the adult diet. They didn't have grains, remember. So when agriculture developed to the point of having grains and, in some cases, some kind of animal milk, all of a sudden women didn't need to nurse seven years. The weaning age dropped to about 3 or 4 at that point. That meant women could have many more children. Their fertility would return and their families were larger, and those civilizations thus grew much faster.
But milk doesn't do well just sitting out for days at a time. And cows don't give milk all year-round, only after birthing a calf. Not having refrigerators in their yurt or cabin or hut, they had to preserve the milk somehow, and of course we know how they did it. For the short-term, there were cultured products like yogurt and kefir. For longer periods, there was cheese. You could keep the cheese and have some protein available year-round.
Incidentally, a family with a milk cow didn't just benefit from milk and dairy to eat. The cow also produced high-quality fertilizer that made their farm much more productive. The synergy involved was just perfect.
I don't have a cow and you probably don't either. If I want to fertilize my garden, I have to go buy a bag of fertilizer. I can't just scoop it out of Bessie's stall. I am not trying to romanticize the old ways, but I do think it's good to remember them, and to honor them. Also, the bread and milk and cheese and butter you make at home is going to taste so good that you're going to consider, just for a minute, getting an acre and a cow. But then you're probably going to remember that you don't really enjoy getting up at 5 a.m. to milk cows and scoop up cow poop, and, like me, you'll settle for making your bread and milk and cheese from ingredients you hunted and gathered at the grocery store.
The bread I'm talking about here is going to be white bread, because it's easier for beginners. Whole-grain baking is an art unto itself, and one worth learning, in my opinion, because whole grains are much healthier. But that's another project.
The best cheese to start with is mozzarella, because it's quick and easy. You can be gorging yourself on its incredibly warm cheesy goodness in less than half an hour, whereas some cheeses have to be aged for months, which would make for a pretty long project.
Butter is easy as heck. You can use a butter churn or a mixer or you can just shake it in a container. If you want to develop your arm muscles, use the manual method. If you just want to get the stuff made fast, use a mixer. It turns into whipped cream before it turns into butter. If you want to dip your finger in at that stage, or even take out a portion to enjoy separately, go right ahead. You almost can't mess up butter. You'll have to press out the liquid and gather all the fat together. You can do this with a spoon, pressing the globs of fat against the side of the container. What is left is buttermilk, and it's sweet to drink. It isn't the buttermilk you find in the store, though. That's a cultured dairy product made much the same way as yogurt is made -- in both cases you stir a bit of the last batch (of yogurt or buttermilk) into milk, and letting it set out until thickened. That's a whole other process, and pretty easy, but a whole other project.
Interested? Read on! Recipes to follow.
Yummy! Reading this makes me hungry.
ReplyDeleteI like the historical insight in this foodie blog :)
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely going to try making my own butter. And I can make waffles with the left over buttermilk for my waffle-loving-husband! AND we can put the freshly homemade butter on the waffles. It's going to be great!