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TO MAKE KUMYss
Take three quarts of good, rich, sweet milk; one quart of hot water, in which dissolve one-half pint sugar; add the hot water to the milk; when this mixture is lukewarm add three table-spoons of brewer's yeast; set in a moderately warm place, stir often, and, when it begins to sparkle (which will be in about one and a half hours), put it into strong bottles and cork tight; put in a cool place and in eight hours it will be ready for use. Procure a champagne tap (cost $1), and draw the best kumyss ever made.
This is a home-fermented milk drink, bottled under live yeast pressure. Two things in it are outside what a modern kitchen can control, so the notes below explain the terms and the failure points rather than offering a working method.
- Why the milk is the problemThree quarts of "good, rich, sweet milk" means fresh, unsoured milk, which in this period would have been unpasteurized, and the recipe never brings it above lukewarm. Held in a "moderately warm place" for hours, unpasteurized milk seeded with brewer's yeast is a growth medium for Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli O157:H7 and Campylobacter. Real kumys relies on a vigorous lactic-acid bacterial culture to drop the pH fast and crowd out pathogens; yeast alone does not acidify quickly enough to protect anything.
- Why the bottling is the problemLive yeast plus a half pint of sugar, corked tight in glass, produces carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. "Strong bottles" was the period's whole safety margin. Pressure here is unmeasured and uncapped by any residual-sugar calculation, and a corked bottle under yeast pressure can burst.
- "Brewer's yeast"In the nineteenth century this meant live barm skimmed off a fermenting beer. The modern product of that name is a dead, defatted nutritional supplement and will not ferment anything. The two are not interchangeable, which is one reason the recipe cannot simply be followed with pantry substitutes.
- "One-half pint sugar"A dry half-pint measure of granulated sugar is roughly 7 oz, about a cup. Note that this is a volume, not a weight — and it is a large sugar load for three quarts of milk, which is what drives the pressure in the bottle.
- "A champagne tap"A spiked tap driven through the cork so the bottle could be drawn off in glassfuls without losing the fizz. At a dollar it was a bought convenience rather than an improvisation.
- If you want kumysBuy it, or use a current recipe built on pasteurized milk and a defined kefir or kumys culture with a proper fermentation temperature and a vented vessel.
Kumys (spelled kumyss, koumiss, kumiss and half a dozen other ways in nineteenth-century English) is the fermented mare's milk of the Central Asian steppe, where it is both a staple and a mild intoxicant the yeast produces alcohol alongside the lactic acid. European physicians took it up in the 1860s and 1870s as a treatment for consumption, dyspepsia and wasting illness, and a small trade in bottled "kumyss" is said to have grown up around sanatoria. What the American version shares with the original is mostly the fizz: cow's milk, cane sugar and brewer's barm in place of mare's milk and a bag-borne wild culture. Recipes of this kind belong to a period when the sickroom diet was assumed to be liquid and predigested, and when a sparkling, slightly alcoholic milk was thought easier on an invalid than solid food.