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Timucua smoking game in Florida circa 1562. Drawings by en:Jacques le Moyne.| Public Domain | Source Preserving Milk Sweet milk is a phrase for very fresh milk, which indicates perhaps there were milks that weren’t fresh milked. Quite common to boil milk, they didn’t know there was bacteria in it to spoil it, but they did know people aren’t always clean, so the way to make it ok was to sterilize it through boiling. Milk naturally separates into milk and cream on top. Cream naturally deteriorates slower. If you leave your milk to sour, it will eventually become cheese, and your tolerance level there will vary, but if you follow these recipes, the devil is in the details here. Still life image from 1610-1619, showing a variety of foods, including dried fruits. | Still life with oysters, roasted chicken, sweets and dried fruits, by Osias Beert (circa 1580–1623) | Source There was a dairy on most farms, where the inside was colder than the outside. It was colder. They want it to be cold and still. In Shakespeare's lifetime, there were milk alternatives, Neil shares that the most common nut milk was almond milk. (Here's a cool article from Atlas Obscura, be aware that the links to The British Library are broken, a casualty of the recent hacking disaster at The British Library, but the details are noted in the caption.) Still life of a table set with a variety of foods, included preserved milk in the form of cheese, and some possibly preserved fish (though I cannot verify whether the fish is actually preserved, it just appears that way to me.) | Still life of a table with cheese, herring, and ham by Jacob van Hulsdonck, between 1608 and 1647 | Public Domain | Source There are recipes that use almond milk, huge amounts of it consumed in the Middle Ages because most days, fast days, Lent, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, are days when you can’t eat meat or fish or meat products (no animal products), so almond milk was really popular but it was also very expensive, you’d have tube very well off to get it.Oat milk, best replacement for proper milk, consumed in Scotland, Northern Wales, and Ireland as well, really a northern commodity. Because oats grow so much better in cooler wetter climates. Suens...a forgotten food now. A table of preserved meats, including sausage, a cow's head, and others. | In the background, a man can be seen storing what is presumably a by-product of harvesting a large animal from a bucket into a storage container. Note all of the clam shells (possibly oyster shells) strown about the ground. | Holy Family distributing alms on their journey to Egypt to escape from Herod's harassment. Various foods – plates in the foreground, meats, ham, lard, smoked fish, pigs' legs and head, bread, butter, milk, cheese and hanging pretzels (in the left corner) – that has been spread out in front of the viewer. The various meats, including...
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