Fresh milk, cream, and butter may not be as
prominent in European and American cooking
as they once were, but they are still essential
ingredients. Milk has bubbled up to new
prominence atop the coffee craze of the 1980s
and ’90s.
Milks
Milk has become the most standardized of our
basic foods. Once upon a time, people lucky
enough to live near a farm could taste the
pasture and the seasons in milk fresh from the
cow. City life, mass production, and stricter
notions of hygiene have now put that
experience out of reach. Today nearly all of
our milk comes from cows of one breed, the
black-and-white Holstein, kept in sheds and
fed year-round on a uniform diet. Large
dairies pool the milk of hundreds, even
thousands of cows, then pasteurize it to
eliminate microbes and homogenize it to