camping, for emergency supplies and for times when you are out of milk in the middle of a

baking project. In an experiment food scientists put a labeled carton of UHT milk on a shelf for

long-term storage. They opened the carton 2½ years later and compared the flavor with one in a

fresh carton. They found no detectable difference in flavor.

Milk has to be pasteurized before it is homogenized. If they homogenized raw milk, the

tiny fat globules became easy target for the disabling enzymes, and the milk would turn sour in

hours.

The dairy industry has also perfected milk in another form—powdered (dehydrated). That

is what they do with the extra milk they cannot sell fresh. Powdered milk keeps well on the shelf

for years. Much of it finds its way to developing countries that have a shortage of fresh milk, but

it is popular with domestic food processors and commercial bakeries, too. Powdered milk is

always non-fat because the fat would oxidize and turn rancid with storage.

You will be surprised to learn that dehydrated milk is not a modern invention. Nomads in

the steppes of northern Asia made sun-dried milk at least 1500 years ago. Their diet was

predominantly dairy, but milk was both too bulky and too perishable to transport on horseback,

so they dried it in the sun and carried the powder in leather pouches. At meal-time they

reconstituted it with fresh water from creeks or springs—they had instant milk.

Milk products

In America, you can buy dairy products in grocery stores, delis, even gas stations, in all

their many forms. All these choices break into two main categories:

1. Uncultured products—butter, cream, half-and-half and ice cream.

2. Cultured products—yogurt, frozen yogurt, sour cream, buttermilk and cheese.

Uncultured milk products

Butter is a common ingredient in most of our cooking. It is absolutely crucial in French

baking, in fact, in any French cooking. But the majority of western cuisines also choose butter as

the principal cooking fat. Oriental cuisines generally do not. Only Indian cooks use it extensively

in its clarified form, ghee.

While perishable, butter doesn’t spoil nearly as quickly as milk. When Indian cooks

remove its milk solids (by clarifying), they don’t even need to refrigerate butter. In clarified form

its shelflife is as long as that of any vegetable oil.

The major problem posed by butter in our culture today is its high saturated fat and

cholesterol content. (The fat in butter is called butterfat, a chemically distinct type among fats).

Many U.S. households have banned butter from their kitchens with regrets, substituting

margarine or oil.

TASTINGS Butter or margarine

Consumption of margarine in the U.S. has slowly increased from the World War

II years until the early 1960s, replacing butter. Since then its consumption has

been steady. What about France where cooking is unimaginable without butter?

Since the mid 1960s both margarine and butter consumption has been nearly

steady. But the French eat four times the butter Americans do. They simply will

not give up on butter.

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