Diverse Traditions

Early shepherds would have discovered the major transformations of milk in their first containers. When milk is left to stand, fatenriched cream naturally forms at the top, and if agitated, the cream becomes butter. The remaining milk naturally turns acid and curdles into thick yogurt, which draining separates into solid curd and liquid whey.

Salting the fresh curd produces a simple, long-keeping cheese. As dairyers became more adept and harvested greater quantities of milk, they found new ways to concentrate and preserve its nourishment, and developed distinctive dairy products in the different climatic regions of the Old World.

In arid southwest Asia, goat and sheep milk was lightly fermented into yogurt that could be kept for several days, sun-dried, or kept under oil; or curdled into cheese that could be eaten fresh or preserved by drying or brining. Lacking the settled life that makes it possible to brew beer from grain or wine from grapes, the nomadic Tartars even fermented mare’s milk into lightly alcoholic koumiss, which Marco Polo described as having “the qualities and flavor of white wine.” In the high country of Mongolia and Tibet, cow, camel, and yak milk was churned to butter for use as a high-energy staple food.

In semitropical India, most zebu and buffalo milk was allowed to sour overnight into a yogurt, then churned to yield buttermilk and butter, which when clarified into ghee  would keep for months. Some milk was repeatedly boiled to keep it sweet, and then preserved not with salt, but by the combination of sugar and long, dehydratingcooking.

The Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome used economical olive oil rather than butter, but esteemed cheese. The Roman Pliny praised cheeses from distant provinces that are now parts of France and Switzerland. And indeed cheese making reached its zenith in continental and northern Europe, thanks to abundant pastureland ideal for cattle, and a temperate climate that allowed long, gradual fermentations.

The one major region of the Old World not to embrace dairying was China, perhaps because Chinese agriculture began where the natural vegetation runs to often toxic relatives of wormwood and epazote rather than ruminant-friendly grasses. Even so, frequent contact with central Asian nomads introduced a variety of dairy products to China, whose elite long enjoyed yogurt, koumiss, butter, acid-set curds, and, around 1300 and thanks to the Mongols, even milk in their tea! Dairying was unknown in the New World.

On his second voyage in 1493, Columbus brought sheep, goats, and the first of the Spanish longhorn cattle that would proliferatein Mexico and Texas.