Raw milk!

When I was a kid my mom always held her breath when she drank milk. She explained that this had been her habit since the time in her youth when the California legislature banned the sale of raw milk. She loved the flavor of raw milk and though she wanted the nutrients of the pasteurized version, she wasn’t able to bring herself to notice the smell (or lack thereof) as she drank it.

I grew up used to the flavor of pasteurized milk, but still read with serious interest when people wrote in praise of raw milk. In the State of Massachusetts, I think it’s possible to buy raw milk somewhere, but I don’t know where and I hear that it’s very expensive.

Here, on the other hand, anybody with a cow is free to sell raw milk and anybody with the guts to drink it may buy it. Anna Adamovna and Evgenny Ivanovich have a summer place (dacha) near a man with a cow, and they loaded up on dairy products just before Alla and I came to visit on Saturday. To buy milk, you simply turn in last week’s three-liter jar and buy a clean jar full. You can also buy smaller jars of sour cream as thick as cookie dough and a couple of kinds of cheese. They bought samples of all of this stuff, and brought it out over lunch.

I can’t describe the flavor of raw milk, except to say that it’s amazingly great. It tastes familiar. I can tell it’s from the same family as milk in the store, but it’s more like the beautiful sister you never met because she wasn’t in your class. Suddenly I forgot my first love and I found myself swooning over the unknown sister.

I found the sour cream pretty impressive too. Interestingly, I’m told that it thickens further after a day, reaching the consistency of butter. Alla would like to use it as a butter substitute, though I’m not sure the shelf life would be convenient. Still, the flavor of these dairy products certainly does attract me out of the city.