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Gallino Curds and Whey, as in Italy
1132. Take a number of the rough coats that line the gizzards of turkeys and fowls; clean them from the pebbles they contain; rub them well with salt, and hang them to dry. This makes a more tender and delicate curd than common rennet. When to be used, break off some bits of the skin, and put on it some boiling water; in eight or nine hours use the liquor in the same way as other rennet. BUTTERMILK. 1183. This, if made of sweet cream, is a delicious and most whole. some food. Those who can relish sour buttermilk, find it still more light; but it is not generally liked. Buttermilk, if not very sour, is also as good as cream to eat with fruit, if sweetened with white sugar, and mixed with a very little milk. It likewise does equally for cakes and rice-puddings, and therefore it is economical to churn before the cream is too stale to make buttermilk fit for nothing but to feed pigs.
This is a method for making a milk-coagulant, not a dish in itself: dried poultry gizzard lining stands in for calf rennet. The technique is genuine and still practised in a few farmhouse traditions, but the version given here has no temperature, no quantity and no control over what grows on the drying membrane.
- Why this one failsRaw poultry offal is salted and air-dried at room temperature with no measured cure, no humidity control and no defined drying time, then infused in water. Campylobacter and Salmonella are routine on raw poultry viscera, and the recipe specifies no heating at any stage after the initial pouring of boiling water.
- The infusion is not a sterilising stepThe infusion is not a controlled sterilising step -- the boiling water poured over the membrane cools, and the liquor then stands eight or nine hours at room temperature, a salted, protein-rich broth in the growth range. The recipe gives no temperature for the standing liquor or for the milk it is added to.
- No quantities anywhere"A number of" gizzard linings, "some bits of the skin" and "some boiling water" give no ratio at all. Coagulant strength in dried stomach and gizzard tissue varies enormously with the bird, the drying and the age of the piece, so there is no way to judge a set except by trial.
- What the ingredient actually isThe "rough coats" are the koilin membrane lining a bird's gizzard, peeled off after the grit is rinsed away. It is not the same tissue as true rennet, which comes from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf and yields chymosin; the poultry membrane works through different, more general proteolytic enzymes. The author claims it gives a more tender and delicate curd than common rennet.
- If you want to set milk todayUse a current recipe with standardised animal or microbial rennet, sold in measured strength with a stated dose per gallon. Vegetarian rennet from Rhizomucor moulds is equally reliable and needs no preparation.
- On the buttermilk noteThe buttermilk remarks that follow describe true buttermilk, the thin liquid left after churning cream to butter. Modern cultured buttermilk is a thickened, soured whole or low-fat milk and behaves quite differently in the uses described here.
Coagulating milk with dried poultry gizzard lining is an old shortcut in households that kept fowl but no dairy calf, and it is reported in various places where birds were slaughtered at home. The title's "Gallino" is often connected to Italian gallina, hen, though this is not documented in the text itself. The buttermilk passage that follows makes the same frugal point: churn while the cream is still sweet, and the by-product feeds the family rather than the pigs. Both entries belong to a dairy economy in which nothing separated from the milk was allowed to go to waste, and in which the means of setting a curd were harvested from the animals already on the premises.