Koumiss
INGREDIENTS.-4 pints of sweet milk, 1 pint of butter milk, a small handful (about 6 lumps) of white sugar.
Mix the two milks together, add the sugar and pour from one jug to another for about 15 minutes, or until the sugar is dissolved. Let it stand in a warm corner of the kitchen for 12 hours, the jug covered with muslin; then bottle in pint bottles, tie down the corks with string and in 4 davs it will be ready for use. Let the bottles lie on their sides.
TIME.-5 days.
SEASONABLE in warm weather. "Leverets and larks! what find we here?
Let us be merry and enjoy such cheer."-ANON.
LAMB.
A cow's-milk imitation of the Central Asian fermented mare's milk, made as a mildly fizzy, faintly alcoholic drink. Everything depends on the buttermilk being a live culture; the printed page also carries some stray text bled in from neighbouring entries, which can be ignored.
- The hinge: live buttermilkSome supermarket "buttermilk" is cultured milk that has been pasteurised after souring, or is simply acidified with lactic acid, and such a product contains nothing that will ferment. Use a buttermilk labelled as containing live or active cultures, or substitute an equivalent volume of plain live kefir. If the mixture has not thickened and turned pleasantly sour after the 12 hours, the culture was probably dead; discard it rather than bottling.
- "Sweet milk"Period shorthand for fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk gives the best body. 4 pints milk to 1 pint buttermilk is a 4:1 ratio, which ferments slowly, so warmth matters.
- 6 lumps of sugarTaking a lump as roughly the size of a modern cube, about a teaspoon each, this is somewhere near 2 tablespoons, 25-30 g. It acts mainly as food for the yeasts and bacteria rather than as sweetening.
- Pouring from jug to jugThis is aeration and mixing, not theatre. A whisk or a lidded jar shaken hard for a minute or two does the same work; the point is to dissolve the sugar and distribute the culture evenly.
- "A warm corner of the kitchen"Comfortably warm room temperature rather than hot. Cooler and the ferment stalls, much warmer and it tends to turn sharp and separate. Twelve hours under muslin gives an open first stage before the bottles are sealed.
- Bottling and pressureThe corks are tied down because the sealed second fermentation makes real carbonation. Use swing-top bottles or thick-walled bottles intended for beer, never a screw-top wine bottle or a jam jar, and chill after the four days to slow the ferment. Lying the bottles on their sides keeps the corks wet so they seal.
- Strength and keepingKoumiss of this kind runs to perhaps 1 per cent alcohol, comparable to kefir. It is a fresh drink, not a preserve; keep it refrigerated and drink within a week. A clean sour, yeasty smell is right, anything putrid or bitter is not.
- YieldAbout 5 pints. Serve cold, shaken, in warm weather as the original suggests.
Koumiss (Turkic kumys) is the fermented mare's milk of the Central Asian steppe, slightly alcoholic and lightly effervescent, and among the oldest documented cultured foods; travellers' accounts of it reach European readers from the medieval period onward. Its appearance in a British household book has less to do with travel than with medicine: through the second half of the nineteenth century Russian physicians promoted a "koumiss cure" for consumption, anaemia and dyspepsia, with sanatoria in the Samara region built around it, and the enthusiasm spread west. Since mare's milk was not to be had in England, chemists sold bottled cow's-milk koumiss and cookery books printed home versions like this one, culturing ordinary milk with buttermilk and a little sugar to get the same sour fizz. The result is closer to a thin kefir than to anything drunk on the steppe, but it reflects a period when fermented milks were prescribed rather than merely enjoyed.