Clabbered milk, also known as loppered milk in some areas of Europe, is a fancy way of saying that milk has gone sour. On telling co-author, Barb, about this delicacy, she remembered a traditional Polish drink her grandparents made: zsiadłe mleko. Indeed, people from all over the world drink and cook with fermented milk, and have for more than 10,000 years.
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I intentionally left the raw milk leftover from butter-making on the table for three days to clabber. The result was this almost cheesy, thickened buttermilk. I used most of it to make modernized corn dodgers, a corn bread popular with Civil War soldiers. What was left, I added to the buttermilk from my second attempt at churning butter, and it clabbered even faster, within 24 hours.
Not only am I now able to reproduce Great great Grandma Avery’s 1898 sugar cookie recipe, I can make my own creme fraiche, saving myself a trip to Canada. It is amazing how many milk products can be simply made with a gallon of milk.
Hamtramck Star
Run out of Ypsilanti since 2005
How cool: I think I can see your palm work on those corn dodgers!
The corn dodgers were pretty good, but the cornmeal buttermilk biscuits that I made last night with the second jar of clabber are fantastic. They have the cleanest, most classic buttermilk aftertaste. I can’t wait to feed these creations to my parents to see what sort of memories they spark.
Congrats on finding the correct Polish spelling! I can pronounce it (SHAD-wem MLEK-o, literally sour milk), but I would have been far off base for the spelling. It was one of my Mom’s childhood favorites. I think she used to eat it on or with rye bread.
I also seem to recall Mom saying that they would leave it out overnight in a pie plate or some other thin vessel so it would thicken. Leaving it in a warmer space helped, like in front of the heater grate during cold weather.
I searched for “Polish sour milk drink” and found a thread about it on a forum. I had a good laugh about the poster who tries to drink up all the milk so his parents “have nothing to work with”.
Checked with Mom on the zsiadłe mleko. Apparently the preferred way to eat it was with boiled potatoes. Confirmed that finding a warm spot in the kitchen helped induce fermentation. Common practice was also to cover it with a kitchen towel, though the practice might have had any number of reasons.
Sour cream is a common addition to baked potatoes, so that makes total sense.
Kitchen towels over the top are surely to allow air circulation without flies, dust, and wild microbes getting in. They can also be used to insulate. Yogurt is made by heating milk to a certain temp, adding the active cultures, and then incubating overnight. The idea behind dairy ferments is that you want to increase the good, aerobic bacteria, so that they overtake and crowd out the purifying, anaerobic bacteria.