Does anyone remember real buttermilk. that is, milk that is the by-product of churning, not the supermarket stuff that is actually a thin version of yogurt, skim milk with a culture of bacteria added to it.
Buttermilk is sweet, thin and blue around the edges with little squiggly yellow flecks of butter in it.
When I was a young sprout in Michigan, my family would regularly drive out to farm stands in the country -- which were real farm stands and the country wasn't so far away-- sometimes, for the sole purpose of buying buttermilk to drink. Farmers sold it by the large paper cupful and provided shakers of salt to add to the sweet milk.
A few years back, I called Sheryl Julian, then the food writer for the Boston Globe. What a snob!! You could hear the elucution lessons coming to the fore as she told me that buttermilk was a man made concoction, a product of bacteria culture and people hated drinking it because the taste is sour. I then asked her if she had ever had REAL buttermilk and she not only confessed that she had not but that she had never heard of buttermilk as the product of churning.
Well, short of acquiring a cow and milking myself, I long for the real thing and have been on the trail of buttermilk for years.
Finally found real sour cherries, which one MA matron told me years ago do not exist:what I thought were sour cherries were just unripe Montemorency cherries!!
Sour cherries most certainly go exist!! When I was back in the old country, the street trees outside my aunt's were sour cherry. We ate a zillion, no a zillion and a half!
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Setanta
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Thu 26 Jun, 2003 09:02 pm
I remember it, my grandmother would get a can of milk from the milk train in the morning, when all was still and cool (my grandfather was station master and telegrapher, the engineer stopped a block short of the station to hand the milk down to my grandmother). She'd remove the top, and, with an 8" shallow bowl on the table, expertly flip the cream out--it stood as an oddly curved cylinder for a moment, and then slowly settled into the bowl, heavier cream than you can buy at the store.
Then she'd churn butter (only for special occassions), and put it in a butter mold, my favorite was the one which produced an elaborate rose, about 4" in diameter. The resultant butter milk could be put in a stone jug, which when wrapped in burlap kept soaked with water (even warm water), would keep the buttermilk all day on the hottest day . . . i love buttermilk . . .
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Mr Stillwater
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Thu 26 Jun, 2003 09:04 pm
Here's a link to an article yesterday on the subject of foods that have been processed by bacteria and the possible health benefits:
My grandfather used to drink buttermilk all the time. I've never actually had a glass. You can still get real buttermilk but usually only on farms. There's one out in Hadley, MA where I know they sell it - which is also where I get my full fat chocolate milk (why 2%? Why?!). I'm sure there are other dairy farms that have it, but they are disappearing.
Sour cherries? I've had sour cherries. Sometimes fruit stores and stands have them here. I'll keep my eyes peeled....
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plainoldme
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 11:38 am
Real buttermilk is sweet. Since it was always salted by my mother before handing it to us, it was both sweet and salty although by the time I had the last few glasses, I was old enough to interrupt my mother before she salted it.
Setanta,
Wow! What a great story! Calls for a novel to be wrapped around it. Makes you sound like someone from the late 19thC, she wrote in a complimentary way.
Sugar,
In Michigan, we made sour cherry pies, thickened not with cornstarch but tapioca, which makes a clearer, thinner pie filling. Yum! My mother had a pitter just for sour cherries which vanished without a trace. Spent many years here in the Northeast, seeking sour cherries or pies made without cornstarch. Found them the last two summers at Wilson Farm in Lexington. Pie at last!
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littlek
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 11:41 am
i know that farm.....
what do sour cherries look like?
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plainoldme
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 11:47 am
Sour cherries are smaller than Montemorency cherries and look a little less like a shapely bottom: in other words they are more round than bifurcated (if that is the right word). They are smaller, brighter red (not at all the maroon of a sweet cherry) and their season is later. Bought a pair of sour cherry bushes this spring. Usually, they grow on trees. Am anxious to see what happens.
Maybe I could bring a sour cherry pie to a late summer, early fall gathering.
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littlek
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 11:52 am
hmmm.... I asked because I saw cherries that were not the usual big red cherries (yum). These were a two-toned red and peach, but had the same shape as the bigger, sweet cherries.
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Setanta
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 11:56 am
POM, my life as a child had very much the "flavor" of the late 19th Century. Although born in New York (then the largest city in the world), i was sent to live with my grandparents while still very small. My grandfather was born in 1897, my grandmother in 1899; life had changed very little in the intervening years. We had electric lights, which probably did not reach that little town until after the First World War. We had electric refrigeration, as opposed to the ice box, which we still kept in the basement, filling it with ice made in the chest freezer, and using it to keep fruit freshly harvested which was not to be canned, but to soon to be consumed. For my grandmother, electric refrigeration, and an electric washer had made her life very much easier--otherwise, the manner and method of getting one's daily life had changed little since 1900.
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Walter Hinteler
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 12:05 pm
So you can't buy 'real buttermilk' in supermarkets?
You get here, in Germany, at least one from the big dairy chains. (My supermarket sells two plus one from the local dairy and one organic real buttermilk.)
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Walter Hinteler
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Fri 27 Jun, 2003 12:13 pm
Sour cherries are used for marmelade/jam/jelly, cakes, pies, tarts ... very, very common in Europe.
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plainoldme
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Mon 30 Jun, 2003 11:00 am
littlek,
There are golden cherries. If the ones you saw were peach and red, maybe they were a red/golden cherry cross. They should be sweet. Really thought this year's crop of sweet cherries was yummy. Enjoyed several bags of fruit enormously.
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ehBeth
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Mon 30 Jun, 2003 12:41 pm
I like the 'glass' cherries that we can still get at farms and markets here. Nice and tart. The small, red, sour cherries make a wonderful soup (with tapioca, of course) with cloud dumplings.
I had a half-pound of eating cherries on Saturday. They were really good - tart and sweet. mmmm
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ehBeth
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Mon 30 Jun, 2003 12:41 pm
Oops, buttermilk. It's still available at some of the smaller dairies around here.
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roger
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Mon 30 Jun, 2003 01:07 pm
I drank buttermilk once; why should I believe these stories again? The stuff should have been marked with a skull and crossbones.
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plainoldme
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Wed 2 Jul, 2003 12:43 pm
ehBeth,
When I was a kid, we used to go to Ontario to buy produce from farm stands. Wonderful peaches and melons that were amazingly fragrant! Once went on a tour of the Heinz plant in Leamington.
Gee, Roger, I'm sorry you disliked buttermilk. I have wonderful memories of it and adored it.
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plainoldme
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Wed 2 Jul, 2003 12:48 pm
Walter,
Europeans enjoy better produce in general than Americans do. I shopped at Farmers' Markets in France and Finland and loved the fruit. The best rasberries I ever had -- and the least expensive -- I bought in a street market in Paris in the Fifth Arrondissemont. Loved the peaches from the market in Finland. European breads and pastries are generally better and less expensive than American equivalents. Did not get past Berlin when I was in Germany in 1976. Did go to a cafe for pigs feet and sauerkraut that I remember fondly.
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Walter Hinteler
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Wed 2 Jul, 2003 12:56 pm
Actually I just in this very minute thought about it:
This BBC article deals with the fact that the European parliament voted to end the GM food ban. However, GM manupulated food must be labelled. Biotech firms (not only the dozen in Europe!) fear such tough labelling and traceability rules will hit sales in Europe.
You still can get bread from a real bakery - not only deep-frozen prepared stuff etc.
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