This is my recollection from UK in the 70s as well. One pint glass bottles with a foil top. It either came in silver-top, which was full fat, and had that cream layer on top, or gold-top, which was extra fat, with more cream.
The glass bottles were left on the doorstep by the milkman. You washed the bottles and put them back out for collection.
Memories of doorstep milk:
seeing the odd house with multiple bottles on their doorstep because they’d forgotten to cancel the milk when they were on holiday
the milk freezing in winter and expanding, pushing the foil lid straight up from the bottle
the local bird population - especially blue tits for some reason - pecking through the foil tops to get the cream
Different breeds of cows produce different amounts of butterfat in their milk (on average). E.g., Jerseys more than Holsteins (but Holsteins give more milk).
So people would sometimes have an option of which type of cow produced the milk and therefore the butterfat content. (Time of year, etc. made things variable.) So there might be an image of a Jersey of Holstein on the label.
Then the Feds decided that whole milk was 3.25% milk fat and things got monotonous.
Milk* only came in quarts. You had several types available in the 50s and 60s: Pasteurized whole milk, homogenized whole milk (still new in the 50s and more expensive), Skim (usually only pasteurized), and chocolate. You usually had a standing order with the milk company: two quarts of homogenized in each delivery, for example. If you anticipated needing more or less, you’d leave a note in the box (many people had a galvanized insulated box where the milk was delivered) or in an empty milk bottles, since all the bottles were property of the milk company and the empties had to be returned.
Nowadays, all milk is homogenized. Pasteurized milk had cream rising to the top, which could be used as cream. You could also get cream and butter.
The TV showed only one type of milk (if they used milk at all – sometimes it was just a bottle painted white on the inside) because there’s no visual difference between the non-chocolate milks.
*and elephants
There was a documentary on TV at this time about a milkman who was caught red-handed switching bottles of sour milk for fresh to discredit a competitor. He later claimed he was innocent and had admitted to the crime only because he wanted to be released so he could make it to the races that day. He was eventually convicted for theft and lying to a police officer, but he continued to deny he was guilty. :rolleyes:
There was an episode of Leave It to Beaver where Wally comes home from school with Eddie Haskell. He takes a bottle of milk (the real stuff) from the fridge and asks Eddie “Hey, you want a hunk of milk?”
Eddie’s reply is “No, I don’t want a hunk of milk.”*
This exchange was apparently funny, since it was deemed worthy of a chuckle on the laugh track.
My favorite milk memory is that time i stayed at a nice hotel in Vienna, and the breakfast buffet had like ten different milks on it, at various fat percentages from skim to half and half (~12%?). I thought the sweet spot was around 4-5%, though probably too rich for day to day drinking.
Still, I wish we had more options for “more fat than whole” milk in the US. Is that something that is common in Europe? Or was this just a particularly fancy hotel that catered to fans of gourmet dairy products?
In Russia and the Baltics, the fat content can vary from 2% to 6%. There may be other grades, but I don’t recall seeing them right offhand. The milk I usually buy there is around 4%, and it keeps a lot better than the stuff available 30 (and even 15) years ago.
One thing that surprised me when I moved to Canada was that some milk is sold in hermetically sealed plastic bags, three to a pack. Each bag contains 1.33 litres of milk, so you get 4 L to a pack. I had never seen this before. Since they take up so much space, I normally buy them only in the winter, when I can store them in a bin out back.
The cream that I buy varies from 10% to 20%. The lower value is for what’s called Half-and-Half in the US. I’ve never tried to make my own whipped cream in Moscow, so I don’t know if there’s anything higher available in cartons. The stuff that comes in pressurized cans (mostly imported from West Europe) can have a fat content of around 30% (or more).
We still got it delivered- glass pint bottles, complete with layer of cream and cheeky bluetits- right up to the late '80s. It’s apparently coming back into fashion in some areas now to get retro style delivery, but not round here.
Non-homogenised milk is definitely a bit of a fringe thing now as well. I prefer it, but there’s only one shop in this town sells it.
Most places here stock whole, semi-skimmed, skimmed* plus maybe 1% and something like Jersey milk (higher fat). And goat milk in full fat and skimmed, lacto-free and assorted non-dairy milks.
The fat % will be listed on there somewhere, but aside from 1% it’s not what we’d call it. We might call it blue top (whole) green top (semi skim) and red top (skim), but that’s only regionally common.
Or, in my Great-Aunt’s description ‘Milk wi all t’goodness tekken out.’
I’m something of an expert on this, since I literally wrote the book on lactose intolerance.
Alternatives to standard cow’s milk were certainly rare before the 1980s. They did exist. Jews who keep kosher are not supposed to mix milk and meat. Several non-dairy creamers were developed for this market. They were fairly easy to find in New York City, the place with the largest concentration of Jews, but only available sporadically elsewhere, usually in a city’s one Jewish neighborhood. Buffalo’s Rich Products Company, e.g., introduced non-dairy whipped topping in 1945 and the non-dairy creamer CoffeeRich in 1961, the same year Carnation introduced Coffeemate. Coming at it from a different pov, California has always been the home to fad diets, and various soy and nut milks were on the shelves of specialty stores a long ways back.
Lactose intolerance (LI) was virtually unknown as a condition, even to doctors, before the 1970s. I have never heard the term before I was diagnosed with it in 1978. The only non-dairy alternatives I remember finding were various Rich products. But Lactaid started selling its pills in 1984. Then Dairy Ease entered the market. They were bought up by large corporations and started a media war to raise attention to LI in the 1990s. That led to most major supermarkets stocking lactose-reduced (later lactose-free) real dairy milk.
Soy milks and their ilk were in the natural foods stores that were fairly common by the time I wrote my first book in 1986 but rare in supermarkets. It took a decade or two for them to enter the mainstream, and they did so very slowly and incrementally. I used to be able to keep track of them and publish listings of brands in various categories that covered most of the market. I gave that up a decade ago when the numbers became overwhelming. (Here’s soy milks from 2005.)
ISTR reading somewhere that unpasteurized milk will spoil in less than 4 hours at a temperature over 40F. Considering old refrigerators could barely maintain a temperature below the surrounding room, you didn’t want milk staying around any longer than necessary. I think the bottles were quarts or possibly half-gallons.
When I was a kid in the 1950s and we had an actual milkman with actual home delivery, I remember the milk was either whole, skim, or cream. I don’t recall seeing 2% milk in the supermarket until the early 1960s.
When did the term “1/2 pint” first become a popular nickname?
Also, my great uncle was drinking goat milk in the 1920’s because he couldn’t handle cow milk. But he lived in sheep country anyway, where they had cgoats. In cattle country there weren’t as many goats.
It was popularized in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s* first Little House on the Prairies book, Little House in the Big Woods, in 1932. Her father called Laura his half-pint of cider, and that became her nickname.
Some historians today believe that Ingalls’ daughter Rose, a professional writer, really wrote the books but realized that they would seem more authentic ascribed to her mother.