So you have run out of milk? You live in the UK and there is (unbelievably) still a corner shop but it is 6am and that doesn't open until 8am. There is no milk for your coffee? And no, you don't drink tea?
Oh. This is disastrous. I can sympathise. I know there are people who are never able to function properly without the early morning coffee-fix but there is not much I can do to help.
I consider myself fortunate that I am not such a person. I will drink coffee but I don't particularly like it.
But it made me think about milk. Milk has been an important part of my life. My mother breast fed all of us and then saw to it that we drank more milk.
This was not a problem in the little place where I was born. Other people kept cows. One of my early memories is of sitting on the cross bar of the Senior Cat's bike, aged about 18 months and going to get the milk from the dairy on the other side of the railway line. It was cold and still quite dark.
I have no idea why I was allowed to go as well or how he managed to keep me and the milk in the can on the bike.
The milk of course came straight from the cow. There was no nonsense about it being pasteurised or low fat or having something extra added to it.
We moved to the city. Milk came in bottles. The milkman delivered it. In our area it was still delivered by horse and cart. We were probably the last area in the city to get milk delivered that way. (Bread came that way too.)
We moved to a very remote area of the state. My mother bought catering size tins of powdered milk. Every morning she would beat the powder into water with a manual rotary beater. This tasted just marginally better than the tap water. The tap water was salty but the small rainwater supply was only for drinking as water - or the Senior Cat's tea. On Middle Cat's birthday (the only one not in the long summer holidays) my mother would make "ice-cream" from a mixture of powdered milk, condensed milk and other ingredients I no longer remember. It was a process that required several beatings of the half-frozen mixture.
The big treat for us as kittens was a scoop of "real" vanilla icecream on the rare occasions we went to a much larger place nearby.
We moved again. This time it was a dairying district and we were back to real milk, straight from the cow. It was my brother's job to get it first thing in the morning - whatever the weather - from the dairy a short distance down the road. The milk was thick with cream and we drank gallons of it at an unbelievably low price. We ate a lot of cream too. Nobody knew about cholesterol readings.
And so it went on. We went back to powdered milk in one place before my mother discovered UHT milk and decided that was preferable.
Now I buy milk in the supermarket. The milkman no longer calls at all. The last milkman stopped delivering about thirty years ago. One of my nephews was here recently. I'd made tea for him and the Senior Cat. He went to get the milk from the fridge.
"You have a lot of milk in here Aunty Cat", he told me. There was a part empty container and a full two litre one.
"Not really," I told him, "It will be gone by Monday."
"Well, I guess you don't want to run out of milk."
True.
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4 comments:
I wonder how much the milk we buy now is like "real" milk from a cow. Is it better for us, with so many things taken away or added, having been turned into powder and then reconstituted (as I suspect), and stored and transported far, far away from its origin.
On the other hand, my husband's grandmother (in the 1930's) swore by the local milk, delivered into her billy at the door daily by the milkman. Until her daughter, a home science student working at the city foods standards department, tested that milk. Milkman's milk cancelled immediately!
LMcC
I remember my great-uncle's special bike. It had a small front wheel like a shop delivery bike, and there were two half-height churns in the holder above into which he dipped pint and half pint ladles to measure he milk into your own jug.
One of our places of work was at an estate with a dairy herd, and every household was entitled to a quart of milk a day. So much cream on the top.
I had been getting raw milk at a farmers market recently and found that it stayed sweet in the fridge for several days longer than the pasteurised stuff. At least the fat in milk is natural, unlike all the seed fats which need to be put through a small chemical refinery before they become "edible".
Last week, I watched a film called Plastic Ocean. As a result of that I'm reviewing various aspects of what I purchase, and how I purchase.
One of those is that I may start ordering milk again from a milkman, in glass bottles.
There is an increasing number of people choosing to do so.
The 'nonsense' about milk to which you refer, to a considerable extent had it's roots in trying to do something about disease carrying in milk.
Yes of course Andrew but the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that people are going "lactose free" (along with gluten free and dairy free) without getting proper medical advice.
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