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Pasteurized Milk
Sterilize milk bottles for twenty minutes in boiling water. Fill bottles nearly full of milk, cork them with sterilized cotton, and put on a rack in a deep kettle of cold water. The water should be as high outside the bottles as the milk is inside. Heat until small bubbles appear upon the milk; then remove to the back of the stove and let stand fifteen minutes. Reduce the temperature quickly and when the milk is cold, remove from the kettle of water, and keep in a cool place.
This is a home water-bath pasteurizing method from the era before dairies were regulated, and it is the one procedure in a book of drinks that should be read rather than followed.
- No temperature is ever measuredEffective pasteurization is defined by a held temperature — either 145F for 30 minutes or 161F for 15 seconds — verified with a thermometer in the milk itself. "Heat until small bubbles appear" and "remove to the back of the stove" describe a curve nobody can reproduce, and the back of a wood or coal range is precisely where a batch can drift below the lethal range for the whole hold.
- What is actually at riskRaw milk carries Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shiga-toxin E. coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes and, in this book's own period, bovine tuberculosis and Brucella. An undershoot of a few degrees leaves them viable, and the milk gives no sign of it — it looks, smells and tastes exactly like milk that was done properly.
- The cotton stoppersSterile cotton plugs are laboratory practice for keeping airborne organisms out of a culture flask. They do not seal a bottle handled in a kitchen, and the bottle is cooled and moved before it is stored.
- "Keep in a cool place"In this book's period that meant a cellar, a springhouse or an icebox, all warmer and less steady than modern refrigeration. Pasteurized milk is not sterile; surviving spore-formers and any recontamination multiply at such temperatures. Modern dairy safety depends on an unbroken chain below 40F, which this method has no way to provide.
- Sealed bottles in a kettleCooling the bottles -- "Reduce the temperature quickly" — moving hot glass into cold water — is a reliable way to crack a bottle.
- What to do insteadBuy pasteurized milk, or consult a current dairy-extension procedure with measured temperatures and hold times if you have a source of raw milk. This page is worth reading as a document; it is not a working method.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance cookery of the early twentieth century, which had to fill the space left by wine and spirits — hence a whole section on milk and malted milk, drinks that were promoted as wholesome, restorative and suitable for invalids and children. That enthusiasm collided with the plain fact that urban milk was then among the most dangerous foods sold: watered, adulterated, hauled unrefrigerated, and implicated in summer diarrhea deaths among infants. The remedy took two forms. One was "certified" milk, produced under medical inspection, a movement generally traced to Henry Coit in New Jersey in the early 1890s. The other was heat treatment, popularized in the United States by the milk depots Nathan Straus opened in New York from 1893, distributing pasteurized milk cheaply in the tenement districts. Municipal ordinances requiring pasteurization followed over the next two decades. Recipes like this one are the domestic echo of that campaign — a housewife with a kettle and some cotton wool trying to do at home what no dairy near her yet did reliably, which is exactly why the compulsory dairy regulation that made her effort unnecessary was such a public-health victory.