The Origin of Milking

The Origin of Milking
For million of years, breast milk has been the first beverage. Replacement with animal milk carried tremendous implications and potential nutritional advantages.

The first irrefutable evidence for milking domesticated livestock and, by implication, human use of milk and the manufacture of dairy products, dates to approx 4000 BCE and is based on Stone Age rock art produced in the central Sahara region of Africa.

By 1500 BCE, milk use was widely distributed, and in India, many of milk’s qualities and already been described in the Charaka-Samhita.

“Cow milk has ten properties: sweet, cold, soft, fatty, viscous, smooth, slimy, heavy, dull and clear. Buffalo milk is heavier and colder than that from cow; useful to cure sleeplessness and excessive digestive power. Camel milk is rough, hot, slightly saline, light and prescribed for hardness in the bowels, works against worms... Milk from one-hooved animals (donkey; horse) is hot slightly, sour, saline, rough, light, promotes strength, stability, alleviates vata in extremities, Goat milk is astringent...”

Anthropologists, geographers and physicians have written on the physiologic and dietary implications of human using animal milk and use or nonuse o flavored particular societies.

With our ability to feed grass to livestock and the use of milk in its raw form or as fermented cheese, humans expanded into new areas of habitation and increased population density.

The majority of other human populations, following the standard mammalian pattern – lose the ability to maintain lactase production and therefore, cannot digest animal milks easily, a pattern evidenced by most Asians, West Africans, Southern European Mediterraneans and most Central and Southern American.

However, some human populations now maintain lactase production throughout their lives, a physiologic characteristic that links peoples and cultures as diverse as east African cattle pastoralist (the Masai, Suk, and Turkana) with northern European Scandinavians (e.g., Danes, Norwegian and Swedes).

Different cultures have widely diverging regarding the suitability of animal milks as human foods or beverages.

For some, it is question of identification: because animal milks are for the young of specific animal, it is wrong to mix these foods because the consumer may take on characteristics or the animal.
The Origin of Milking

The Story of Martini

The Story of Martini
As modern mixed drinks go, the martini is pretty old. It probably originated as the Martinez, which was invented in San Francisco during the wild Gold Rush years by a celebrated local bartender named Jerry Thomas.

Purists who advocate a dry martini take note: Thomas’s recipe was anything but dry. It consisted of four parts vermouth to one part Old Tom (sweet gin) – practically a mirror opposite of today’s drink and it also sported a dash of bitters and two dashes of maraschino liqueur in addition to the vermouth.

By the 1920s, the Martinez had become the martini, but even a “standard” martini, 1920s-style, went pretty heavy on the vermouth: four parts gin to one part vermouth.

And if the opinion of literary scholar Bernard DeVoto is given credence, the standard had not changed much by 1949.

In that year, DeVoto published a classic essay on the martini in Harper’s, decreeing the perfect ratio as 3.7 parts gin to 1 part vermouth.

Even in the 1940s – and one suspects, earlier as well – there were champions of the truly dry martini.

Gin to vermouth rations of 12 to 1 and 20 to 1 were proposed. Sir Winston Churchill, who had strong opinions about everything from how best to deal with Herr Hitler to the proper placement of prepositions, believed that a dry martini should be prepared by merely casting a glance toward an unopened bottle of vermouth while pouring the gin into the mixing glass.

And speaking of mixing, there is the controversy over whether the drink should be stirred or shaken. Agent 007, of course has always insisted on having his martini “shaken, not stirred.”
The Story of Martini