So
is buttermilk good or not? I never could reconcile the stories my
grandmother told of churning milk to separate the butter from the buttermilk
with the ghastly-tasting buttermilk available at the grocery. How could
milk go sour just by taking the fat out of it? L.V. Anderson explains
with the history of buttermilk, or rather, the different things that
have been
called buttermilk.
My mistake was assuming that the buttermilk I had ordered
would be the same kind of buttery buttermilk that Laura Ingalls Wilder
had drunk in the late 19th century. This was a bad assumption. What we
call buttermilk today has nothing at all to do with butter. In fact, the
stuff known as cultured buttermilk at your local supermarket—i.e. milk
that has been deliberately soured—is a 20th-century invention, and the
product of a health-food diet craze dating back to the flapper era.
The distinction has to do with the lack of refrigeration in the days
when people made their own butter. Sometimes the milk would be good;
other times it had soured over the time it took to churn, or maybe it
started out sour.
So
is buttermilk good or not? I never could reconcile the stories my
grandmother told of churning milk to separate the butter from the buttermilk
with the ghastly-tasting buttermilk available at the grocery. How could
milk go sour just by taking the fat out of it? L.V. Anderson explains
with the history of buttermilk, or rather, the different things that
have been called buttermilk.
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