With Milk and Sugar Blest 203 



that finish your house walls. Eighty percent of all the casein 

 that goes into industry is used to size paper. However, the 

 corn does not have to go through the dairy to get into our 

 books and magazines and wallpaper. Even more cornstarch 

 than casein is used in paper manufacturing and finishing. 



The corn which comes to us by way of the cow is chiefly 

 valuable as food. As butter and cheese and milk and cream. 

 As kefir and koumis and yoghurt and clabber. The first of 

 these soured milk foods is made by the natives of the Caucasus. 

 They make a yeast of grains of kefir, add it to milk and allow 

 fermentation to take place. Then the milk is strained and 

 cooled before serving. Like kefir, yoghurt is reputed to do 

 great things for one by cleansing the lower intestine. It was 

 Dr. Metchnikoff, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, 

 who advanced the claims of yoghurt, or Bulgarian soured milk. 

 He discovered that the peasants of that part of the Balkans, 

 in whose diet yoghurt figured largely, lived to a great old age. 

 Metchnikoff attributed this longevity to the action of the 

 soured milk on the lower intestine. Immediately Paris res- 

 taurants featured yoghurt on their menus, and the elderly rich 

 all over the world clamored for soured milk and youth. Amer- 

 icans who grew up on farms, or in the days before milk was 

 pasteurized, did not need a foreign doctor to prescribe clab- 

 ber to them. 



Of course you can't make clabber in all weathers. The best 

 clabber requires a sultry day and a thunderstorm to sour the 

 new milk quickly. Lacking a dash of lightning, you can set 

 the crock of milk close to the kitchen stove until the milk turns 

 and becomes solid. Then it should be set on ice, or in the 

 spring-house to chill. Cold clabber with sugar, cream and 

 nutmeg is the finest of all milk desserts. It even seriously 

 rivals ice cream. Not in popularity, of course. Nothing else 

 approaches that. We Americans eat two gallons of ice cream 

 per person, annually. And our appetite for it increases every 

 year. It is our national sweet. 



