Got Milk?

Candelyn:  I've been really interested in milk lately.  There is a big debate lately between pasteurized milk and raw milk.  You have told me that at times, you had a milk cow in your family.  Did you drink raw milk?  Or did you do some sort of home pasteurization?  Did you worry about milk-borne diseases?  TB?  E Coli?  How did you handle the milk?  What about cream?  Did you make butter?  Was the leftover skim milk?  I'm curious to know all about milk.

Milk Cows

We had a milk cow in Safford,  Snowflake, and during the summers in Woodruff and at the ranch.   Our family almost always had a Jersey cow because their milk was better in some way.  I think it had more cream in it.  We  sometimes had more than one milk cow at a time especially when we made cheese.


The cows were fed hay.  If they were allowed to roam the streets and eat weeds, the milk tasted terrible.  Obviously, the cow must have gotten out of the fence sometime or I wouldn't have remembered the taste of the weedy milk.  Once our milk cow bloated and died.  It was really sad because we saw her as a pet who had always been with us and because we had no source of milk at that time.


We always drank raw milk, but our cows were healthy and weren't around other cows to catch diseases that the pasteurization  is supposed to prevent.  Also, my dad washed his hands, cleaned the cows milk bag, and used a sterilized bucket to milk into.   The milk was strained through several layers of cheese cloth held in place by a gadget, specially made, called, strangely enough, a milk strainer.  It held the cheese cloth taut. The cheese cloth strained out such things as cow hairs that fell into the milk bucket.

Two Generations of Milk for Sale 

We sometimes sold milk.  Someone in town who didn't have a cow, would send their child to pick up the milk.  It was 10 cents a quart and they would bring a bottle with them and my mother would pour the milk into their bottle.  This reminds me of a story my mother told about her mother in St Johns.  Her mother bought milk from someone in town who would send it in a bottle with the cow owner's young son.  My grandmother poured the milk into her own bottle and went to the sink to rinse out the bottle so the boy could take it home.  The boy said,   "Oh Sister Isaacson, my mother already added the water to the milk.''  Trust a little child to let the truth slip out.  

A Built-in Milk Cooler

In our  Snowflake house we had a milk cooler in the kitchen.  This was a built- in skinny cupboard that was open to the cool air under the house and vented at the top of the house.  The shelves were screen wire so the air could circulate around and the doors were solid and shut tight to keep the flies out and the cool air in.   This was built into the house before people had refrigerators.  We had a refrigerator but still used the milk cooler to store extra milk in pans.  The cream would rise to the top of the pans and the milk would turn to clabber, which is similar to yogurt.  The cream would  sort-of dry out and become leathery.  We would lift this off and sometimes eat it on bread with a sprinkle of sugar. I think this is like the clotted cream that they serve on scones in England.   Usually the cream was saved in a jar in the refrigerator until we had enough to make butter.  The clabber was eaten like yogurt with a sprinkle of sugar.  I think this is the curds and whey told about in Little Miss Muffet.   

Clabber

We did not have skim milk since, by the time the cream rose to the top of the pans, the milk had turned to clabber.  I just looked up clabber in the dictionary to see if it was a real word, since my computer keeps flashing me that it isn't.  The dictionary says it is short for bonnyclabber and means curdled sour milk. To me, curdled milk is sort of grainy like tapioca pudding, yogurt is like warm smooth pudding, but clabber was definitely set up similar to the consistency of jello.  Actually, some yogurt does set up just like clabber.


My mother also made cottage cheese with this clabber by cutting the clabber into small cubes and cooking it on the stove until the cubes turned into shriveled up lumps.  The whey was poured off and milk or fresh cream was added to the curds. It tasted just like cottage cheese tastes today.   Once she made "farmers cheese" in a cloth sack  which allowed the whey to drain away and the curds to meld together.  This was a sort of soft cheese that didn't need to be aged, but could be sliced.  

Making Cheese

We also made regular cheddar cheese in a brand new square galvanized tub.  It required huge knives to cut the cubes which were not cubes but slanted chunks.  Because of the depth of the tub, the knife had to be inserted slantwise to get the set milk cut into pieces in such a deep tub.  It was cooked in this same large tub until the curds formed.

These pictures of the cheese press and wooden board looked very much like what we had.


The cheese had yellow dye added to the milk along with rennin tablets to make it set up.  After the curds formed, they were put into a round, straight sided tin mold.   A round board that fitted the metal container exactly was pushed down onto the curds.   A heavy rock was placed on top and left for several days to push the curds together.  Eventually, the cheese was covered in cheese cloth and dipped in wax.  Then these rounds were aged in a cool cellar at the ranch.  This cheese was not tasty to me as a child.  It was very strong.  I guess it would be called  "very sharp" in today's marketplace.

 Eventually my parents bought a milk separator.  It was very ingenious with a lot of parts.  The milk was poured into the top bowl and two spouts were at the bottom.  Out of one came milk and out of the other came cream.  It had a big crank that you turned.  One summer it was my job to separate the milk every morning.  I developed huge muscles in my arms from the effort needed to crank the separator. I think I was able to do chin-ups for the first time in my life.


 We made a lot of butter that summer because my parents knew that we were moving to Phoenix in the fall and would not be able to have milk and cream.  The butter that we made was eventually frozen at a food locker after we got to Phoenix, but much of it was already rancid.  My mother would use it to make spice cakes hoping the spices would cover up the rancid taste of the butter.  I learned to hate the taste of spice cakes because of this.

Our butter churn had a lid that screwed onto a wide mouth gallon jar.  It worked like an egg beater with a handle that turned round and round and inside the jar four wooden paddles turned the cream.  When the butter began to form you would watch as it built up  on the paddles. Then the buttermilk was poured off and sometimes drank, but it seems to me that we didn't really have that much buttermilk from the leathery cream we skimmed from the pans.  There was more buttermilk when we used the cream from the separator.  The butter would be washed in cold water and worked with the paddle to get out all of the milk. Then the butter would be gathered up and kneaded to get out the water.  The butter paddle was made by my father from a piece of cedar (probably juniper, which we called cedar because of it's smell.)

This is just exactly what our mold looked like

 The butter mold was a purchased wooden box with a hole in it.  Another tight fitting piece of wood with a handle went into the box with the handle poking out of the hole.  Then the butter was forced into the box and smoothed even with the top of the box.  The box was turned over and you pushed the handle and out would come a one pound block of butter.  This was wrapped in wax paper and kept in the refrigerator until it was used on a butter dish or used in making a cake. When we were at the ranch we had no electricity and no refrigerator so it was kept in a cool place.  This lack of refrigeration would account for the stock of rancid butter made that summer to be used later in the fall and winter in Phoenix.

Whipped Cream

We always had whipped cream.  Sometimes if you weren't careful, you would whip the cream too long and it turned to butter.  No one was happy about this, since there probably wasn't anymore cream to start over and so dessert had no whipped cream..  We had whipped cream on cakes, cobblers, pies, and fruit salad, of course, but we also had whipped cream on finely grated carrot salad. 

Ice Cream

We had an ice cream maker and made ice cream.  Once it hailed fairly big hailstones and so everyone gathered up the hail and using this free ice, made ice cream in their ice-cream makers using salt to lower the melting point.  Some people had a cooked recipe for ice cream, but my mother didn't make it that way.  She made it just with cream, sugar, and vanilla.  She also added fruit like strawberries, peaches, or bananas if they were available.

This aluminum Wearever juicer was like the one we used to make lemon juice for the ice cream, except ours was taller.

         My mother also made ice cream in the refrigerator.  It was a combination of bananas, lemon juice, sugar, and cream.  When it was almost frozen she would beat it with an electric beater until it was smooth and then she would return it to the ice tray and freeze it again.  When I was teaching in China in 2002 and 2003, I

 made ice cream just like this from memory.  Some students who were at my house at the time were surprised that you could make ice cream this way.   (Speaking of ice cream in China, you could buy ice cream with peas in it from the street vendors.  I have no idea why anyone would make ice cream with little green peas in it, unless parents bought it thinking it was healthier for their children.) 

Another summer when we lived in Woodruff, I said that I wanted to learn to milk a cow, so my dad said that he would teach me.  In our family we have very long fingers you can't just squeeze the tit with your whole hand like many people do, but you have to fold your fingers back against your palm in an uncomfortable manner.   First you squeeze your pointer finger followed quickly by the middle finger, then your ring finger, and finally your baby finger.  You always milk with both hands and alternate the tits so that you squeeze with the right hand and then as that tit fills up with milk, your left hand is squeezing on another tit.  You always remember the sound of the first few squirts as it hits the bottom of the bucket, ping, ping, ping and then is soon becomes a soft "swoosh, swoosh, swoosh."  You continue this rhythmic motion until all the milk is out of the first two tits.  Since a cow has four tits you now switch to the other two.  It is important to "strip" each tit or you wont get the cream which evidently comes out last.  I have no idea if this is true for certain, since I have not thought of any of this in all the time since.   Another reason for stripping the milk is so the cow doesn't "dry-up" and quit giving milk.  This sometimes happened when children were assigned to milking the cow.  That summer  I did develop bulging muscles on the my lower forearms from milking.  This was the only time I milked cows and it was at my request.


I thought I was through talking about milk, but then my slow computer brain brought two more stories to mind.  When we first moved to Phoenix milk was delivered in a milk wagon pulled by a horse.  This was very unusual since no one drove horses anywhere else on the streets except during the rodeo parade.  Nearly everyone on the street took milk this way. The milkman would signal the horse to stop and he would get out of the wagon carrying a wire basket with a handle that contained the number of bottles of milk for that house.  He came in through the back door and put the milk into your refrigerator for you.  Sometimes this meant rearranging your refrigerator so that all the bottles fit in.  It is hard to believe that people could be so trusting even in a fairly large city like Phoenix.




  Some of the jars had a bulge at the top where the cream would rise to the top and with a special cupped spoon you could clog up the milk and pour off just the cream.  In those days people liked to put cream on their cereal.  Years later, I was appalled that one of my brothers bought cream just to put on his cereal.    The milk bottles were cleaned and put outside the door for the milkman to return to the dairy for refilling.  


When my parents built their new home in the early l950's they had the latest thing built into the wall under the carport.  It was an insulated box that opened to the outside for the milkman to insert the milk bottles and an inside door for you to pull the milk bottle into the house.  I think just as they had it installed, the dairy quit delivering milk and you had to buy it at the store.
   
I think this blog might be titled TMMI for "too much milk information," but you did ask for it.