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Koumiss
2 quarts new milk 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons water 1/3 cake compressed yeast Let the yeast dissolve in the water; add it to the sugar and milk and let the mixture stand in a warm place for about ten hours or until it has thickened. Pour from one vessel to another until thoroughly smooth; bottle and keep in a warm place for twentyfour hours, or longer in winter. Cork the bottles tightly and tie the corks down. Shake for a few moments before using.
This is a home ferment of raw milk with baker's yeast, sealed under pressure and held warm for a day or more. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- "New milk" means raw milkIn the period this recipe comes from, milk fresh from the cow, unpasteurised and unrefrigerated. Raw milk can carry Salmonella, Listeria, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Campylobacter, and nothing in this method heats the milk at any stage.
- Ten hours in a warm place, then twenty-four moreThe milk is held for well over a day at an unspecified "warm" temperature, with no thermometer called for, which overlaps the growth range of those same organisms. A yeast ferment contributes alcohol and carbon dioxide rather than rapid acidification, and any souring here depends on whatever bacteria the raw milk happens to carry, so no reliable acid barrier can be assumed.
- Corked and tied downLive yeast in a sugared liquid, sealed in glass and kept warm, generates real pressure. Bottles tied at the cork to contain that pressure are a burst hazard; the instruction exists precisely because the corks would otherwise blow out.
- No measurable endpointThe recipe gives no temperature, no target acidity and no way to judge whether the ferment has gone as intended or has been overtaken by something else. "Until it has thickened" describes spoiled milk equally well.
- Compressed yeastCakes of compressed fresh yeast were sold in several sizes, the smaller ones under an ounce, so a third of a cake is a small quantity by modern standards. The amount is not the problem here, but it explains the odd measure if you meet it elsewhere in the book.
- The stray "1 pound figs"This line has nothing to do with the koumiss method and appears to have come from an adjacent recipe.
- If you want the drinkCultured milk drinks of this type are made today with pasteurised milk and a defined kefir or koumiss culture, under controlled temperature and with vented containers. Use a current recipe from a source that specifies both.
Koumiss (also kumis or kumys) is the fermented mare's milk of the Central Asian steppe, mildly alcoholic and lightly effervescent, and long a staple of Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Mongol herding life. European physicians took an interest in it in the second half of the nineteenth century, when koumiss cures were promoted for consumption, dyspepsia and general debility, and Russian sanatoria built a reputation on the treatment. Since mare's milk was unobtainable in American and British kitchens, cookbooks and pharmacy manuals of the 1880s to 1910s printed imitations built on cow's milk, sugar and baker's yeast, which produce the fizz and the tang without much resembling the original. Its appearance in a household book of this kind reflects the era's confidence that a therapeutic beverage could be raised on the back of the kitchen stove.