Thursday 25 February 2016

Old fashioned milk

I spent the very early years of my life in a dairy farming region far to the north of where I live now. My memories are of rolling green hills, dirt roads, picking native raspberries with my cousins, the creek at the bottom of a steeply sloping paddock and, of course, cows!

We lived up the road from my aunt and uncle. They had a dairy which is long gone now even though they still live in the same house on the same land. My family didn't have a dairy but we did have a house cow, a black and white fressian, named Maggie. Although I don't remember milking her with my mother, I do remember the thick layer of cream that could be skimmed off with a spoon and the most delicious ice-cream that my mother made and set in battered old cake tins. I have a memory of the taste of that ice-cream but, as much as I try, I can't replicate it! No recipe for it can be found in any of my mother's well-used, splattered cookbooks and she can't remember how she did it either because she stopped making it when we left the area and no longer had a house cow.

I was thinking about all this the other day when I bought some milk. I am fussy about milk, a legacy of my early childhood no doubt. And not long ago, at a little bakery not far from where I live, I found some lovely full-cream, unhomogenised milk in glass bottles. Old-fashioned milk!




I bought two bottles of this milk, produced less than two hours away from the city where I live, and found it to be delicious and creamy! I love that it's available in glass bottles as well as the standard plastic milk bottle though they can't be collected, sterilised and reused as yet but they can be recycled. I thoroughly washed both of the bottles I bought and they are now in our fridge holding chilled water.

I haven't attempted to make ice-cream with this milk yet but I will soon. I wonder if it will bring me any closer to that taste of the long-ago ice-cream my mother used to make for us. I might also try setting my next batch of ice-cream in a battered, heart-shaped cake tin as that might help too!


Meg








8 comments:

  1. When I was a child, I have vivid memories of the taste of our local yoghurt. I have never tasted a yoghurt that comes close. It was tart, thin, and had chunks of real strawberries in it, and on occasion we would be allowed to get one off the milk man when he delivered the milk in his van. Nothing like the thick, sweet, gluggy muck you get today. It was real yoghurt, in the days before they mucked around with it! So I can so relate to the ice cream story!

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    1. That yoghurt sounds delicious, Cheryl. What a treat that must've been!

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  2. We can buy milk in Tasmania in bottles like that too. When you return the bottles you are refunded money. Milk tastes so much better to me out of glass bottles.

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    1. Hi, Kellie. I think it tastes better from the glass bottles too! I really hope that one day soon these bottles will be able to be returned as that just makes sense as far as reducing waste goes. It's great that there is a scheme like that in Tasmania:)

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  3. I bet that little farm looks after their cows well too!

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    1. Yes, I believe that they do. I haven't visited but you could if you wished to as their website states that they have dairy tours. I want to support them as much as possible because they are a small family-based dairying outfit trying to make a living from their milk. My aunt and uncle, whom I mentioned in my post, had to give up dairying when the government regulated that industry. They switched to growing tea!

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  4. We buy Maleny pasturised only milk and I love it. It is as close to house cow milk (which I had as a kid) as I can find.

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    1. Yes, if I can't get this milk then I opt for Maleny milk too. The little greengrocer I visit stocks their milk, cream and yoghurt and it's nice to support him too.

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