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Peptonized Milk
1 tube Peptonizing Powder cup cold water ¼ pint fresh milk Put powder into a sterilized quart bottle, add water, and shake until powder is dissolved; add milk, shake and place on ice. Use as needed, is dissolved; add milk, shake and place on ice. Use as needed, always keeping remainder covered on ice.
Peptonized milk may be served warm by putting bottle in vessel of water (115°F.) and keeping at the same temperature 10 minutes. Serve immediately. 1 cup Irish Moss 1½ cups cold water
A pharmacy preparation more than a kitchen one: milk partly pre-digested with a pancreatic powder so that a weak stomach could take it. The text as printed here is damaged, and it will not work as a set of instructions without some reconstruction.
- The text is garbledA line is duplicated ("is dissolved; add milk"), and the amount of peptonizing powder is missing from the list of ingredients at the top. Read the recipe as: peptonizing powder, 1 cup cold water, 1 pint fresh milk.
- What the powder wasPeptonizing powder was pancreatin (a pancreatic enzyme extract, prepared from hog or ox pancreas) blended with sodium bicarbonate to keep the mixture alkaline enough for the enzyme to work. It was sold by the tube or packet in drugstores, a five-grain dose to the pint being the usual strength. Nothing on a supermarket shelf corresponds to it; lactase drops do a different job, splitting milk sugar rather than breaking down casein.
- Peptonized is not lactose-freeThe point of the process was proteolysis — chopping milk protein into peptones and amino acids so it would not curd into a heavy mass in the stomach. It does nothing for lactose intolerance and was not intended to.
- The hinge: stop the reactionEnzyme action continues as long as the milk is warm, and milk taken too far turns unmistakably bitter. That is why the original puts the bottle straight on ice and why the warming step is held to ten minutes and served immediately rather than left standing.
- 115°F in modern termsAbout 46°C — hand-hot, near the top of the pancreatin's working range. A vessel of water at that temperature is a warm-water bath, not a simmer; boiling water would denature the enzyme outright.
- "Fresh milk" in 1900In this period fresh milk often meant raw milk, and invalid cookery was aimed at people least able to cope with a milk-borne infection. Any milk kept for repeated use over hours, as here, should be pasteurized.
- Sterilized quart bottleA wide-mouth quart canning jar boiled ten minutes, or run through a dishwasher sanitize cycle, gives the equivalent. The quart size leaves headroom for the shaking the powder needs, though the recipe does not say so.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half, to be drawn on in small glassfuls and the remainder kept covered on ice.
Peptonizing — "artificial digestion" — was one of the enthusiasms of late nineteenth-century therapeutic feeding, when the newly isolated pancreatic enzymes were put to work outside the body on behalf of patients thought too weak to digest ordinary food. Pharmaceutical houses sold the powder in graduated tubes with printed directions, and peptonized milk, peptonized gruel and peptonized beef preparations turn up in hospital diet kitchens, nursing manuals and infant-feeding schemes from roughly the 1880s onward. Its appearance in a life insurance company's cook book would be characteristic enough: insurers of that era are often said to have distributed household literature to policyholders as public-health work, and a section on invalid cookery would sit naturally beside advice on ventilation and infant care. The practice faded as pediatricians moved to formulas built on measured dilution and added sugar, and as confidence grew that plain milk suited most invalids well enough. The bitterness that dogged over-peptonized milk did not help its cause.