Milk (41 page)

VARIATION II:
In the nineteenth century, custardy fillings of the general sugar-butter-eggs type were often baked without a crust; both crusted and crustless versions were commonly called “puddings.” For a buttermilk pudding made without a crust, use 1½ cups sugar, 4 tablespoons cornstarch, ¼ teaspoon salt, 6 egg yolks, 6 tablespoons melted butter, 2 cups buttermilk, 4 teaspoons lemon juice, and a generous grating of nutmeg; mix as above, pour into a buttered 1½-quart baking dish, and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 35 to 40 minutes.

T
he name means “hang up,” and the dish consists of buttermilk poured into a cloth that gets tied into a bag and hung up to drain until it reaches the consistency of sour cream. It is eaten lightly sugared. Nowadays many people in the Netherlands use yogurt instead. I think the flavor of cultured buttermilk goes better with the usual garnish of crumbled Holland rusks. Recently I realized that rusks seem to have become an obscure item, at least in the United States. So has zwieback, my second choice. The best thing to use if you can’t find either is plain Italian biscotti.

This no-work dessert is often enriched with a little whipped cream, and it goes beautifully with all kinds of fresh berries. The recipe can easily be doubled, though it’s probably quicker to drain it in two separate cloth bags than one. For suggested uses of the leftover whey, see
this page
.

YIELD:
About 3 cups
hangop,
5 cups buttermilk whey

Line a colander with
tight-woven
cheesecloth or other clean cotton cloth and set it over a bowl or pan as for
Fresh White Cheese with Cultures
. Pour the buttermilk into the lined colander and let the whey drain until it is only intermittently dripping, usually about 1 hour. Gather up the corners of the cloth and tie them together to make a bag that will hang as compact and high as possible. (If necessary, tie the neck of the bag with butcher’s twine to pull it up more.) Hang the bag of curd over a container deep enough to hold the accumulating whey without letting it touch the bottom of the bag.

Let the buttermilk curd drain overnight, or until it has lost more than half its volume in whey and resembles thick sour cream. Turn it out into a bowl, scraping off the last bits that cling to the cloth. Beat the creamy curd smooth with a wooden spoon. If you want to enrich it a little, whip the optional cream stiff and fold it into the hangop. You can fold in a little of the sugar now, but I prefer to pile the unsweetened hangop in a serving dish and scatter it with crumbled rusks, sugar, and cinnamon. Serve with fresh fruit.

F
or some reason, people who love buttermilk don’t always like
yogurt. I have on occasion sung the praises of cold yogurt drinks to doubting Thomases whose mood altered completely when I asked whether they liked drinking buttermilk. As mentioned in the yogurt chapter, there’s considerable confusion in
Anglo-Indian usage about what constitutes “buttermilk” or “yogurt,” the reason being the Indian custom of souring milk to a yogurtlike state before churning it to butter. The resulting buttermilk is closer in flavor and consistency to yogurt than our true buttermilk (whether made from ripened or unripened cream) or cultured buttermilk. Indian cooks in both India and this country often cheerfully call for “buttermilk” in a recipe when they’re really thinking of yogurt or something yogurty-tasting. This is my idea of a useful and productive misunderstanding. If Americans fond of buttermilk are thereby sparked to try something that they’d otherwise ignore, why not?

So I advise buttermilk lovers to explore its possibilities as a drink by taking a little inspiration from yogurt country. The American ways of using this deeply satisfying thirst-quencher have not been especially adventurous. Some seventy years ago people might mix it with some sugar and ground cinnamon. Occasionally contemporary cooks turn it into a kind of fruit smoothie, thinned or not with some plain milk or water. I suggest going further: Glance through the recipes for Indian sweet or “salt” lassi as well as Turkish ayran in the yogurt chapter, and experiment with buttermilk versions of any that take your fancy. Please be sure to use the richest cultured buttermilk you can find (at least 1.5 percent milkfat), made without added thickeners. It makes a wonderful drink with nothing but a dash of salt and some crumbled dried mint. I think it’s even better with Indian seasonings like cumin seeds, cilantro, hot green pepper, and slivered ginger.

Introduction

Salted versus Unsalted Butter: Some Historical Perspective

A Shopping and Handling Primer

Home-Churned Butter and Buttermilk: Sweet-Cream Type

Home-Churned Butter and Buttermilk: Ripened-Cream Type

Clarified Butters: A Revisionist View

European-Style Clarified Butter

Ghee (Indian Clarified Butter)

Nit’r Kibeh (Ethiopian Spiced Clarified Butter)

Beurre Manié

Flavored or Compound Butters: Some Suggestions

Beurre Blanc/Beurre Rouge

Beurre Noir/Beurre Noisette (“Black Butter”/“Brown Butter”)

About Butter-and-Egg Custards

Hollandaise Sauce

“Buttered Eggs” (Skillet-Custard Eggs)

Lemon Curd

About Butter in Pastry

Basic Pâte Brisée

Lemon Tart

Canadian Butter Tarts

B
utter is one of life’s simple pleasures—except that nothing about it is simple but the eating. What you detect in even the most plebeian mass-produced cows’-milk butter has depths only half-fathomed by modern chemistry.

To get a small glimpse of the complexities beneath the surface, take about one or two tablespoons’ worth of cows’-milk butter—real 100 percent butter, not something dubbed “light butter” or “spreadable butter”—and plan to sample it at refrigerator temperature, room temperature, barely melted, briefly cooked, and resolidified. It can be salted or unsalted, but there should be no other added ingredients.

Start by unwrapping some cold butter and sniffing it. Depending on the individual batch, you may smell almost nothing or a tantalizing lactic quality without a name. Cut yourself four small pieces. A fraction of a tablespoon each will suffice. Watch the way the knife goes through the clean, cold, waxy substance. Return three pieces (and the stick they came from) to the refrigerator. Carve off a tiny bit of the fourth and put it in your mouth. Like the Cheshire Cat, it will vanish a little at a time, with a long, elusive finish. Eat another bit, trying to register the stages of smiling disappearance: waxy and solid, less solid but mysteriously cooling, more and more melted, nearly gone, gone but not forgotten. Different flavors will blossom in your mouth as all this unfolds. If your sample came from cultured butter, you may fleetingly think of crème fraîche or a soft red wine. If not, those notes will be missing; nonetheless, what you taste will echo what Henry James tasted in the words “summer afternoon.”

Now put the rest of the piece on a plate, and leave it in a warm room—close to 80°F, if possible—for an hour or two. Give it another sniff. Any prior aroma will be amplified. Nick off a bit to eat. This time the fatly glistening stuff will offer about as much resistance to the knife as face cream. You will recognize some of what you tasted before, but not the same progression of effects. The first sensation on the tongue will be close to greasiness, and the act of tasting will be somewhat truncated, as if some part of the original butter had just flown off into thin air. (It has.)

Now take one of the remaining chunks out of the refrigerator and prepare to just barely melt it. The best way is to start warming a little water in a small shallow pan, taking it off the heat when it is slightly hotter than lukewarm. Cut the butter into bits no larger than small peas and put it in a heatproof container like a glass custard cup or small measuring cup. Lower this into the pan of water and watch while the butter gradually melts. Don’t be in a rush; what you want to see is the moment at which the last identifiably solid bit is gone. Sniff
and taste the butter from time to time while this is happening. The fragrance will become less delicate and perhaps almost cheesy. The marvelous fusion of nameless flavors will begin to come unglued, with a bland, oily taste poised against a faint sourness (how faint depends on the particular batch and how it was made). At the same time, you will see the butter resolving itself into clear fat and shoals of infinitesimal white flecks. When it is fully melted, some of the white parts will almost cloud over the top while some float toward the bottom.

Put the melted butter back into the refrigerator to chill until it is completely solid. Taste it a few times during this brief process. When it is hard and cold, take a good look and a good taste.
It will never go back to what it was.
You may be able to thaw and refreeze ice, or melt and recongeal an aspic. Nobody can do anything of the kind with butter. Once it has melted, its major components go their separate ways and can no more be put together again than Humpty Dumpty. As low as the melting temperature was (the last bits would have dissolved at about 99°F), your resolidified butter has lost the silky closeness and marble opacity of the original and is more like some congealed oil. It has a slightly coarse, grainy feel on the tongue, and a trace of sour whitish liquid may cling to the underside.

Now take another chunk of butter from the refrigerator and put it in a small heavy saucepan or skillet. Melt it on low heat, standing over the pan to observe everything as closely as possible. After the stage at which the last piece melted, the white flecks will start to swim around briskly and gather themselves into a sort of foam. Swirl the pan from time to time; stick in a spoon and carefully taste the hot butter once or twice. It will seem less and less recognizable as butter, but the kitchen will be filled with the deep, soul-warming
smell that all right-thinking Americans once knew as “buttery.” You will see a little steam rising from the butter before the foam dies away. Another few seconds, and the white stuff—now easier to make out as separate specks—will start turning brown. Swirl the pan and take it off the heat just as the fat itself begins to change color, before everything careens down the slippery slope toward absolutely burned butter.