My Daughter the Dairymaid

Go figure. My daughter decided to spend her last summer before leaving for college in New York City working on a dairy farm in northern Vermont, and, doting mother that I am, I have just returned from a visit up to the land of cows, hay bales, and maple syrup. It’s quite a feeling to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and make your bleary way to a barn where some 40 Holsteins stand, patiently (or not) waiting to be milked. As my daughter, in her dirty jeans and muddy wellies, got to work cleaning teats and attaching what to my eyes looked like a four-limbed metal octopus to almost unbelievably massive udders, I, in typical fashion, got to pondering. The longer she milked, the more my mind wandered, its meanderings accompanied by the hypnotic whooshing of the milking machine, the gentle lowing of the cows, and the sweet grassy smell of new mown hay. 

What is it about dairies, I wondered, that exerts such a fascination over me? Is it that I’m forced to acknowledge that milk doesn’t, after all, begin life as a fat-free homogenized pasteurized tasteless liquid in a plastic jug container—not to mention the fact that it certainly wasn't intended to be drunk by the likes of us? Step one foot into the dairy and you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that nature meant milk to be drunk warm and full of fat.

Or is something less practical responsible for my fascination?

Is it that, literary type that I am, novel after novel comes to mind, first and foremost Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with its description of the “large-veined udders [that] hung ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy’s crock”? 

Anyone’s who’s fond of 19^th century novels is bound to think of a milkmaid or two. For that matter, anyone’s who’s fond of northern European painting is bound to think of all those canvasses of milkmaids, Vermeer’s the most well known of them all.  

It’s no accident that dairies have traditionally been tended by milkmaids, whether in life or art. In fact there’s even more of a connection between the two than meets the eye. The first syllable of dairy comes from an Old English word dæge which meant “female servant” or “housekeeper.” More literally still, it meant “kneader of bread”—it’s from dæge that we also get our word dough. Obviously it fell to the female servants to both knead the dough and milk the cows. The last syllable of our “lady,” by the way, comes from that same Old English dæge, which means that no matter how refined the lady, there’s still a bit of the dairy in her.

But make no mistake. The milkmaid of yore did not have a lady-like life. As an 18^th century farming treatise noted, “she may be known by her red plump arms and hands and clumsy fingers: for in most great farms they are forced to milk their cows abroad, a great part of the year; I may say, almost all the year even in frosts and snows, while their fingers are ready to freeze in the action: and sometimes while they stand in dirt and water, and indeed, it may be justly said of these, that their work is never done.”

And so my thoughts wander as my daughter patiently makes her way down the line of cows, each one collapsing into a ponderous mass of flesh and bone after having been milked. From a cow's perspective, milking is as exhausting a business as it was to the milkmaids of a pre-industrial age.  All things considered, even with milking machines and automated round hay bale feeders, my daughter’s likely to find life easier come September when she heads off to college. At least her arms and hands will.

Milk: Why do we love to hate it—and hate to love it?

A short piece for today, this last day of October, and I’ll tell you from the outset that what you’re about to read has very little to do with Halloween. I figure there are already pumpkins enough out there; and besides, I have a great pumpkin recipe I’m going to share with you closer to Thanksgiving—and it’s not for pumpkin pie! But the fact that it's Halloween does me think about children. More specifically, it makes me think about children coming home with candy, way too much candy. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing to do with all that candy is wash it down with a great big glass of milk. Ice cold milk. Straight out of the fridge. What could be better? Well, according to many adults I know, almost anything.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a food that inspires as emotional a response as milk. Drinking a glass of the stuff, that is. Pouring it over a bowl of cereal is fine and adding some to your morning coffee is OK too, but gulping down a glass of it straight out of the fridge? A little iffy. And even if you do indulge in a glass at home now and then—generally with a late-night cookie, a slice of chocolate cake, a piece or two of Halloween candy, or, on the other hand, over a lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—do you order it when you’re dining out on poisson au beurre blanc or pasta puttanesca? My guess is no. Why not? Why is it considered right and proper to order wine or beer or soda or water or even (if you live in the Midwest) coffee with your dinner, but not milk?

Because milk is for babies. They’re the ones for whom it’s produced, after all—nature didn’t intend it to nourish adults, which is why most babies are weaned from their mothers’ breasts about the time they start cutting the teeth that allow them to enter the wonderful world of solid food. Why bother with milk when you’ve got so many more appetizing options? And then there’s the business of lactose intolerance. Mammals generally lose the ability to digest lactose at about the age of two, which is explanation enough of why so many adults gag at the thought of a glass of milk: quite literally, it makes them sick.

 But the more you think about the matter, the more you have to admit that there are a lot of adults who keep drinking milk long after they’ve been weaned from the breast (granted, the milk of other species). They don’t associate milk with infancy; they just like to drink it and they can do so with no ill effect to their digestive systems, no doubt because milk has comprised such a major part of their diet for so many millennia that their physiologies have adapted to it. Who are they? The people who call it milk—or Milch, melk, mjolk—as opposed to the people who call it lait, latte, leche, or lapte. Whereas the milk-drinkers love the stuff, the latte-drinkers find it disgusting. Interesting, huh? People who speak a northern European language like German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and, yes, even English drink it, and people who speak a Romance language like French, Italian, Spanish, or Romanian don’t. Who said there’s no connection between the sounds that come out of our mouths and the things that go into them?

How this lacto-linguistic divide came into being is a matter of historical record. When Julius Caesar first stepped foot on northern soil, his astonished comment about the natives was “they live on milk and meat.” We can only imagine how queasy he must have felt: there were actually people who drank milk? But being Roman, he didn’t call it milk; he called it lacte, the beverage that he associated with babies—and with people who were little more than babies, barbarians. No Roman citizen would touch the stuff (except, of course, to transform it into cheese)—and neither did anyone who spoke a language that evolved from Latin. Up north, however, where the stuff was called milk, they saw not a thing wrong with drinking the raw liquid—and so they did. As they do to this day.

But here’s the rub. Even those of us who call it milk and who drink it as adults nonetheless echo Caesar’s disbelief and disdain. Certainly we do in public. Which is why we’re far more likely to drink it in the privacy of our own homes—standing in front of the refrigerator in our pajamas in the middle of the night—than when we’re out and about in the public eye. Don’t believe me? Just try ordering a glass the next time you’re out for dinner and see for yourselves what your friends and relations have to say.

Now, back to Halloween. I wonder if I've got enough candy to hand out tonight. I wonder if I've got enough milk on hand to wash down whatever's left over.