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Matzoon
Mix in a pitcher one and one half ounces of matzoon and one quart of fresh milk. The prepared matzoon may be bought in a drug store. Stir well and keep in a warm place for twelve hours, until it begins to thicken. Then heat it for ten minutes and put in patent stoppered bottles. Do not fill full as it effervesces. Keep on ice.
This is a home yogurt drink made from a purchased starter, written when the starter was sold over a druggist's counter rather than in a grocery cooler. Two details govern the result: the temperature of the "warm place" and how tightly you seal the bottles.
- What matzoon isMatzoon (also madzoon or matzoun) is the Armenian word for cultured milk — yogurt. The "prepared matzoon" sold at the drug store was a dried or liquid starter culture; a few tablespoons of plain live-culture yogurt or a packaged yogurt starter does the same job.
- The measurementOne and a half ounces is most likely a fluid measure, which would be about 3 tablespoons of liquid starter to a quart of milk; the recipe does not say whether it means fluid ounces or weight. If you are working from dried culture, follow the quantity on the packet instead — dose is not interchangeable between forms.
- Say the temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; 'a warm place' in a period kitchen would have been well below modern incubation heat, which is why twelve hours was allowed. Modern practice is roughly 105-115F held steady — an oven with the light on, an insulated cooler of warm water, or a yogurt setting — at which the milk will thicken in 5 to 8 hours.
- Use pasteurized milkThe recipe says only 'fresh milk.' Use pasteurized whole milk; culturing does not make raw milk safe, and the ten-minute heating comes only after the twelve hours at incubation temperature.
- Why it is heated afterwardThe ten minutes of heat stops fermentation so the drink does not keep souring in the bottle. It also kills the live cultures, so if you want them, skip the heating and refrigerate instead — then drink it within a few days.
- The effervescence, and the bottlesA fizz suggests the culture carried gas-producing organisms, possibly yeast as in kefir, alongside the lactic bacteria. Swing-top bottles left in a warm room can build real pressure; the recipe says not to fill them full and to keep them on ice, so leave plenty of headspace and get them cold promptly.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, four to six glasses. Poured cold it is thick and tart; in the Armenian tradition such cultured milk is thinned with cold water and a little salt, and sweetening with sugar is an obvious option.
Matzoon reached American households through two channels at once: Armenian and Syrian immigrant cooking, which brought the word and the drink itself, and the medical enthusiasm for sour milk that swept Europe and the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, generally traced to Elie Metchnikoff's writings on lactic ferments and long life. That enthusiasm is why the culture is bought at a drug store rather than a market: cultured milk was understood as a mild, digestible food for the sick and the convalescent.