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Koumiss
Heat four cups milk; cool; when lukewarm, add one fourth yeast cake dissolved in one fourth cup lukewarm water, and two tablespoons sugar. Pour into bottles with patent stoppers, fill two thirds full, cork tightly. Shake; let stand in kitchen six hours, then on ice for twenty-four hours; serve ice cold.
A cow's-milk imitation of the Central Asian fermented mare's-milk drink, made overnight with baker's yeast. It works, but the bottling is the part that needs attention.
- Pressure is the whole riskYeast plus sugar in a sealed bottle produces carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. Fill no more than two thirds, as directed, use bottles rated for carbonation (swing-top beer bottles or clean plastic soda bottles), and release the stoppers over the sink once or twice during the six hours at room temperature. A plastic bottle that has gone rock-hard is telling you to vent it.
- "Patent stoppers"The wire-and-porcelain swing-top closure, also called a lightning stopper, standard on beer and mineral-water bottles around 1900. A modern swing-top bottle is the same thing. Screw caps and crown caps will also hold, which is precisely the problem.
- A quarter yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of the period ran about 0.6 oz. One quarter of it is roughly 1/2 teaspoon of active dry yeast, or about 4 g fresh yeast if you can find it. More will not make it better, only gassier and more bread-like.
- Use pasteurized milk, and heat it anywayThe recipe says only to heat the milk, without a temperature; scalding to around 180F would knock back competing bacteria so the yeast dominates. Lukewarm means 95-105F; much above 115F starts to kill the yeast.
- Six hours means six hours in a warm kitchenAt 68F the ferment will be sluggish; at 78F it may be ready sooner. Judge by a faint yeasty smell and a hiss on opening, not the clock, and get it onto ice before it turns sour and bready.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, four generous glasses. It is thin, faintly effervescent, tart and distinctly yeasty. Open cold bottles slowly and pour at once, as the milk foams up hard.
Koumiss (kumis, kumys) is the fermented mare's milk of the Central Asian steppe, where it has been made for centuries in leather or wooden vessels and where the natural ferment yields both acid and a little alcohol. It reached Western cookbooks by way of medicine rather than pleasure: from the mid-nineteenth century onward European and American physicians promoted koumiss as a digestible food for invalids and consumptives, and commercial bottled "koumyss" made from cow's milk was sold by dairies and druggists through the turn of the century. Domestic recipes like this one are that fashion in miniature, an approximation using the yeast cake and the swing-top bottle already on hand rather than a mare, and it sits in Lowney's alongside other light nourishing drinks a household might make for the sickroom or for a hot afternoon.