A recent cheese shopping expedition, and this thread, got me to thinking:
We have cow’s milk cheeses, sheep’s milk cheeses, and goat’s milk cheeses. Some nomadic steppe dwellers used to (and maybe still do) make fermented milk out of horse’s milk. Why have I never heard of anyone making anything out of pig’s milk? Is it that pigs are fiercer than other domestic animals, or is it something about the taste or composition of the milk itself?
Also, has anyone tried anything made with horse’s milk? What does it taste like? It’s not kosher, so I can’t try it for myself, even if it were available in a market I shopped at (which, as far as I know, it isn’t).
First of all, I think that pig’s don’t have udders, which would help the milking process. However, there is no lactose in it, so it might be a good subsitute. Looking forward to the response.
Oh, while searching, I found this very informative site:
I believe that pigs, like horses, aren’t easy to milk and don’t give a lot. I’ve read somewhere that Mongols used to be very attached to their horses, and had a very horse-intensive culture, down to the point of using horse milk. Milking the horses was a very specialized job, and there were guys trained to do precisely this. Apparently it wasn’t easy.
Off topic, but I recently read Tim Severin’s In Search of Genghis Khan and it’s very obvious from this work (in the late 1980s I think) that mare’s milk is a very important part of Mongol culture.
As for pigs, I don’t know nuthin’ about milkin’ no pigs.
It’s true that pigs don’t have udders so they are not milkable the way cows are.
It’s not at all true that pig milk doesn’t have lactose. It has almost exactly the same amount of lactose as cow’s milk, about 5%.
The books of anthropologist Marvin Harris have a great deal of information on how the differences between pigs, cows and other edible animals have shaped cultures and food preferences.
As the phrase goes, every word Robert Cohen says is a lie, including it, but, and the.
