Clabber
To have clabber in perfection, place in small glass dishes or bowls enough milk to make clabber for each person. After it has turned, set it in the refrigerator, if in summer, till called for. By the way, refrigerators (as well as water-coolers) should be washed every morning with water in which a tablespoonful of common soda has been dissolved. They should then be aired before filling with ice for the day.--Mrs. S. T.
Clabber is milk left at room temperature until the native lactic bacteria thicken it into a soft, tart curd, eaten with sugar, cream or nutmeg. The instruction assumes a raw, unpasteurised, un-homogenised milk that no longer reaches most kitchens, and the method fails in a specific and unsafe way with the milk sold today.
- Why it cannot be reproducedClabbering depends on raw milk's resident lactic acid bacteria souring it faster than spoilage organisms can take hold. Pasteurisation greatly reduces that population, so pasteurised milk left out on a counter is colonised by whatever survives or arrives afterwards, and it tends to putrefy rather than clabber.
- The pathogen risk in raw milkRaw milk held for hours at summer room temperature is a growth medium for Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Campylobacter. Nothing in this method heats the milk at any point, so nothing reduces that load, and the dish is served cold and uncooked.
- No time, no temperature, no acidity check"After it has turned" is the whole of the fermentation instruction. There is no target holding temperature, no elapsed time and no pH endpoint, so there is no way to tell a successful acid ferment from an early spoilage. If you want cultured milk, use a current recipe for a defined starter culture with pasteurised milk.
- What the household assumedWhat the household likely assumed -- Mrs. S. T. appears to be writing for a household with a reliable daily supply of fresh milk that would turn dependably within a day. That reliability, rather than any safety margin, is presumably what made so brief a direction sound sufficient.
- "Refrigerator" here means iceboxIn 1879 the word describes an insulated wooden chest cooled by a block of ice, typically holding somewhere in the 45-55F range and warmer near the top. It is not equivalent to a modern compressor refrigerator at 40F or below.
- The soda washA tablespoon of "common soda" is washing soda or baking soda dissolved in water, used as a mild alkaline cleaner to cut butterfat films and the sour smell they leave in a wooden ice chest. The advice is sound housekeeping and the only part of this entry that survives intact.
- PortioningThe individual glass dishes look practical rather than decorative: clabber breaks and weeps once disturbed, so it was presumably set and served in the same vessel, one per person.
Clabber - from the Irish clábar, by way of "bonny-clabber", thick sour milk - was one of the plainest foods on Southern and Appalachian tables, and it survived in cookbooks long after urban households stopped keeping a cow. In a dairy household milk was a daily surplus that could not be held, so souring it deliberately was less a recipe than a way of using what would otherwise be thrown out; it was eaten for breakfast or supper with sugar, molasses, black pepper or cream, and the drained curd became a fresh cheese. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), a compilation of contributions from named Virginia housewives, shows the book's habit of recording domestic routine alongside cookery - the recipe here is barely two lines, and the contributor spends as much of her entry on scrubbing the icebox as on the food itself. That the two topics sit in one paragraph is a fair picture of a kitchen where keeping food cool and keeping it clean were the same daily problem.