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Koumiss
Strictly speaking, koumiss is fermented mare's milk, and it is a favourite drink among the nomadic tribes who inhabit Siberia and Chinese Tartary. But a very good substitute for it is made from cow's milk, and is highly recommended as an article of diet for the sick. It is made thus. Dissolve a pennyworth of German yeast in a little water, and mix it with a quart of perfectly fresh milk and a table-spoonful of sugar. Put the mixture into champagne bottles, cork them down, and wire them. Shake the bottles for a minute to mix the ingredients thoroughly, then place them on end in a cool place to ferment slowly. After three days lay the bottles on their sides, and turn them occasionally. In five days the koumiss will be at its best, but it will keep for an indefinite time in a refrigerator.
This is a fermented raw-milk drink bottled under pressure in glass and prescribed to invalids. Both halves of that description are reasons not to attempt it.
- Raw milk, never heated"Perfectly fresh milk" in Victorian usage means untreated milk straight from the dairy, and nothing in the method brings it near a pasteurising temperature. Milk held for days in a cool larder while it ferments is still a growth medium for Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli O157 and, in the period, Brucella and bovine tuberculosis.
- Given to the sickThe whole point of the entry is that koumiss was fed to invalids and convalescents. Those are exactly the people — immunocompromised, elderly, sometimes pregnant — for whom unpasteurised dairy carries the highest risk of severe illness.
- No acid protectionGenuine kumis is soured by lactic acid bacteria working alongside the yeast; the falling pH is what holds spoilage organisms in check. Baker's yeast alone produces carbon dioxide and a little alcohol but almost no acid, so this substitute lacks the one safeguard the original drink has.
- Bottles under pressureA quart of sugared milk inoculated with yeast, corked, wired and left for five days generates substantial carbon dioxide with no way to vent it. Champagne bottles are built for pressure, but an uncontrolled milk ferment in glass is a genuine burst hazard, and "keep for an indefinite time" compounds it.
- An unquantifiable dose"A pennyworth of German yeast" was whatever the grocer scooped for a penny — compressed fresh baker's yeast, but the amount is not recoverable and would have varied by shop. There is no way to reproduce the intended fermentation rate, which is the variable that governs the pressure.
- If you want koumissCommercially made kumis and kefir are widely sold, and modern home recipes work from pasteurised milk with defined cultures and vented vessels. Use one of those rather than this entry.
Kumis is the drink of the Central Asian steppe: mare's milk fermented by a mixed culture of lactic acid bacteria and yeast, mildly sour, faintly alcoholic and lightly fizzy. Herodotus describes the Scythians processing mare's milk, and the practice is generally traced through the Turkic and Mongol nomads whom Cassell's calls "the nomadic tribes who inhabit Siberia and Chinese Tartary". Its arrival in a British kitchen dictionary owes much to nineteenth-century Russian medicine, where kumis sanatoria ear on the Volga fore treated tuberculosis and wasting illness with a regime of steppe air and mare's milk. The kumis cure was fashionable enough to draw Russian literary patients and to be reported in the British medical press, and it seems to have been understood as an article of sickroom diet. Since mare's milk was hard for a Victorian household to obtain, a cow's-milk imitation raised with baker's yeast could be substituted, which reproduces the fizz and the faint spirit of the original while missing the souring bacteria that define it.