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What the Irish Ate Before Potatoes
- secondcoming 5y agoThe most famous story about cattle raiding is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Táin_Bó_Cúailnge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Táin_Bó_Cúailnge (Contains spoilers)
- nly 5y agoFun Irish fact: pubs in Ireland are closed on St Patrick's Day. There's also a variety of delicious, regional potato based products that, until very recently, you won't have found anywhere else but in Ireland. The way boxty is made for instance, is crazy to me.
- annamargot 5y agoYour fun fact is hilarious from an American perspective. It’s the biggest day for bars and pubs in the US and it’s not close. It’s funny how Irish culture in America seems so different from its motherland counterpart. Same or more so for Italian. No judgements either way. Just interesting how diaspora cultures evolve
- nly 5y agoWell, just because the pubs are closed it doesn't mean they don't drink. I'm unsure if it's true, but I've been told one reason racing is popular on St Pats is because the tracks serve alcohol.
- GeneralTspoon 5y agoThis whole thing is nonsense - pubs aren’t closed. And most people aren’t anywhere near a race track on St. Patricks’s Day. Unless they’re in Cheltenham, which is in a different country.
- GeneralTspoon 5y agoThis “fact” isn’t a fact. Pubs aren’t anywhere near closed in Ireland on St. Patrick’s day. It’s probably the busiest day of the year for them.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoSo, this was true until the 30's or so. So it's possible that this was passed down the generations as fact. It's not true any more though.
- basisword 5y agoOnly a guess but this would likely have been because St. Patrick’s Day is a “holy day”. People attend church (lots still do although in the last couple of decades it’s declined massively) and closing pubs would be in line with how some other “holy days” are treated. An example of this is Easter in Northern Ireland. There are still some relatively strict licensing laws over the Easter weekend (although these are about to modernise) with pubs shit for large parts of it.
- secondcoming 5y agoThe most obvious difference is that it seems to be called St Patty's Day in the US, for some reason. Nobody in Ireland calls it that.
- DFHippie 5y agoAnd people call it St Patrick's day in the US as well.
- ac29 5y ago> Your fun fact is hilarious from an American perspective. It’s the biggest day for bars and pubs in the US and it’s not close. Must be a regional thing. Its not like that where I live, and a quick search suggests both New Years Eve and Thanksgiving Eve are busier days (which matches my experience).
- Mongey 5y agopubs in Ireland are not closed on St. Patricks day.
- john-n 5y agoNot sure where you got this from, but this is entirely incorrect.
- raffraffraff 5y agoProbably confused it with Good Friday, another big day on the Catholic calendar.
- rat87 5y agoseems outdated https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/all-pubs-ireland-closed-st-patricks-day https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/all-pubs-ireland-... You may be surprised to learn that all the pubs in Ireland used to be closed on St. Patrick's Day, which is now by and large considered a drinking holiday. Up until the 1970s, Irish law prohibited pubs opening on March 17 as a mark of respect for this religious day. It was feared that leaving the pubs open would be too tempting for some during Lent and would lead to a disrespectful amount of drunkenness on this most solemn day.
- paleotrope 5y agoPotato pancakes? Those seem pretty common around the world. I looked up some recipes and I am not sure I understand what it considered special about them.
- implements 5y agoIt’s a good way to use potato and flour, and makes a nice breakfast fried in butter alongside an egg.
- spacec0wb0y 5y agoYes, and no turkeys are consumed at thanksgiving and no music is played at mardi gras.
- another-dave 5y agoThis reminds me of that thing where people read the newspaper & say "wow, I can't believe they got $MY_AREA_OF_EXPERTISE so wrong" but then turn the page & take in other stories as if they were gospel truth. Next time someone tells me a fun fact about another country I shall remember the 'closed pubs' of Ireland on Paddy's Day!
- tough 5y ago> "wow, I can't believe they got $MY_AREA_OF_EXPERTISE so wrong" Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- another-dave 5y agoThanks, that's it — can never remember the name!
- dingaling 5y agoWe need a name for the effect wherein people will believe that something exists just because someone gave their unsupported theory a catchy name.
- nly 5y agoYeah, I clearly misremembered/mistrusted what my partner (Irish) told me and paid the karma cost :) Oh well.
- fouc 5y ago> McDonald’s fries to dip in your Shamrock Shake I briefly thought a Shamrock Shake was gonna be gravy flavored. Anyone think a gravy flavored shake could work?
- gaganyaan 5y agoI think a gravy-flavored shake is just called gravy
- kupopuffs 5y agoIs there ice cream in normal gravy???
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThere's plenty of fat in gravy. There's water. It's served warm, so the water is not ice, but what more do you want?
- webwielder2 5y agoI read in the book 1493 that the Irish were basically the healthiest Europeans post-potato and pre-famine because potatoes+milk is as nutritionally complete a diet as you could find.
- redis_mlc 5y agoWhen the Irish (and I think Scots) went to university back in the day, they took a barrel of potatoes with them for the semester as their "meal plan." So they ate potatoes two to three times per day, every day.
- jamil7 5y ago> because potatoes+milk is as nutritionally complete a diet as you could find. That can’t be true.
- Linosaurus 5y agoYou'd need some added restraints to make it possibly plausible. 'Best among affordable 2-food diets', maybe. Which is quite different.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoIf we limit the scope to macronutriens it is indeed correct. If you could choose only one food to eat, potatoes would be a wise choice. Every other single food will cause you to become deficient much more quickly. Disclosure: studied nutritional medicine
- i_am_proteus 5y agoBetter potatoes than the flesh of a pastured ruminant?
- chrisco255 5y agoNo, ruminant meat such as beef or steak or even fatty fish such as salmon is a far more complete source of nutrition. Pre-agricultural humans lived almost exclusively on meat for hundreds of thousands of years. Potatoes lack certain essential nutrients meat does not, such as Vitamin D, Vitamin K, heme iron, zinc, omega 3s, etc. Our bodies are highly adapted and evolved for meat only diets: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate-meat-and-little-else-study/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jasonhansel 5y ago> As traditional as it seems, the Irish Soda Bread that you might be trundling out this weekend wasn't invented until 19th century, since baking soda wasn't invented until the 1850s. Interesting fact: prior to the development of baking soda, ammonium (specifically, ammonium carbonate) was a commonly used leavening agent for cookies and crackers. It was obtained by distilling ground-up deer antlers, giving it the traditional name "salt of hartshorn".
- loonster 5y agoGreat read,Thanks.
- dpeck 5y agoGastropod had a great episode about potatoes that touched on this and a lot of the myths / great man of history stories about the introduction of the potato into Europe. Worth a listen if you’re into food, history, and related topics https://gastropod.com/this-spuds-for-you/ https://gastropod.com/this-spuds-for-you/
- intrepidhero 5y agoWait, Rowanberries are edible? > Rowan fruit contains sorbic acid, and when raw also contains parasorbic acid (about 0.4%-0.7% in the European rowan[15]), which causes indigestion and can lead to kidney damage, but heat treatment (cooking, heat-drying etc.) and, to a lesser extent, freezing, renders it nontoxic by changing it to the benign sorbic acid. They are also usually too astringent to be palatable when raw. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan Oh, only kinda.
- quickthrower2 5y agoLike beans that need to be cooked and processed carefully before consumption.
- tvb12 5y agoBeans have to be carefully processed? I soak them in a half-gallon Ball jar for at least a day, but that's pretty much it. I usually swap the water out a few times because I procrastinate pretty badly when it comes to cooking and the water gets murky after half a day or so. If I haven't cooked them by the next morning I toss them in the fridge so that they don't start smelling sour. What have I been neglecting to do, and when should I expect it to kill me?
- nanomonkey 5y agoActually the lacto-fermentation process that you're starting to do to the beans is great for getting rid of the phytic acid and other "anti-nutrients". Just rinse them and add clean water before cooking them. Tossing in a teaspoon of baking soda will off set any acid produced from the process which might cause the beans to remain too firm while cooking.
- dunham 5y agoJust certain varieties are toxic if not properly cooked. I think red kidney beans are one of them.
- lathiat 5y ago
- jmclnx 5y agoSome ancient roman historians wrote about this diet also. I never saw the full text
- uyt 5y agoTIL about "bog butter" and half a dozen other culinary terms that I've never heard of. Maybe for good reasons we don't make these food anymore? (banbidh, old curds, real curds, bainne clabair, sowens, flummery, etc)
- chadcmulligan 5y agoI have vague memories of my (Irish) grandmother making flummery when I was young. It tasted like strawberry mousse or junket iirc.
- MPSimmons 5y agoA _lot_ of these things sound like various kinds of cottage cheese, yogurt and cultured butter. I would guess we _do_ make things they might recognize, just with modern standards of cleanliness.
- amyjess 5y agoAlso, these are all staples of Indian diets even in modern day: paneer, raita, ghee, etc.
- dustintrex 5y agoPastoral societies like Mongolia still retain many of these: http://www.khovsgoldairyproject.org/news/mongolia/dairy-products/ http://www.khovsgoldairyproject.org/news/mongolia/dairy-prod... Iceland also has quite a selection of dairy, with skyr recently becoming trendy.
- m0llusk 5y agoSeems more like issues with production and markets. When my parents were growing up on a farm they made butter and sold it at market, but the creme freshe which was a byproduct of the whole process was considered to have no value and they cooked with it because it could not be sold. Now creme freshe is considered a luxury gourmet ingredient for fine cooking and commands a premium. Food fashions vary wildly.
- stan_rogers 5y ago
- weatherlight 5y agoGuess which country is tied for dead last. (Lactose intolerance) https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-intolerance-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-i...
- secondcoming 5y agoI thought it might be Viking related, but Norway has three times the levels of intolerance as Denmark.
- 3np 5y agoI always wrote it down to generally large intake of fresh milk and dairy. Norway has more mountains and less pastures compared to Denmark and Sweden.
- spurgu 5y agoQuite surprised Finland isn't in the top 10, it has similar historical importance here.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThe source for that page has a much better layout, and shows Finland at 12th. There seems to be a separate lactose intolerance that also affects people starting when they are infants and it's most common in Finland. https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country/ https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country/
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoWow, expected to see those other Northern European countries up at the top of the lactose tolerance list, but was surprised to see Niger. Googling brought up some interesting data on how lactase persistence was selected for in Africa.
- chrisco255 5y ago
- justshowpost 5y agoWheat, oat and barley?
- pvaldes 5y agoPlus sea birds, seafood, seals an whales. Americans ate a lot of acorns also, and many europeans did, so maybe irish did the same And of course lots of rabbits
- dghughes 5y agoI find it amazing that Ireland would be eating a plant from the west coast of an isolated mountainous region of South America less than 100 years after Europeans went there. Even things like oranges and bananas were rare in the late 1800s early 1900s in the US and Canada. It's amazing how much of food from the Americas mostly central and southern is normal everyday food. What would we all be eating if the Americas went undiscovered until recently?
- juki 5y agoThis comes up surprisingly often on HN, but there isn't really anything surprising about it. The whole reason Europeans went to the Americas was to bring back things to be sold in European markets. They might have been a bit disappointed when potatoes turned out to be so easy to grow in European climates that there was no money to be made by importing them, though.
- stephenhuey 5y agoBread and pasta, perhaps?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThough that pasta would be pretty bland without any tomato sauce! Also weird to think that, as much as many people associate tomatoes with Italy, they were also brought from the Americas.
- igouy 5y agoHere you'll find non-tomato condimento -- https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sauces_Shapes_Pasta_the_Italian_Way/rUczAQAAQBAJ https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sauces_Shapes_Pasta_the...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Though that pasta would be pretty bland without any tomato sauce! You'd use onions and garlic. Those are both still massively popular today. Cheese, garlic, and oil are all staples for flavoring pasta, and none of them rely on a new world crop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- twobitshifter 5y agoIt’s mentioned in passing but my understanding is that parsnips were much much more popular.
- rffrancon 5y ago"They did eat meat, of course, though the reliance on milk meant that beef was a rarity" I find that hard to believe. Cows need to be pregnant to milk. Roughly half of their calves would be male. Which were primarily valuable as meat. Further, cows produce more milk than their calves require, which means calves could be matured. Beef was probably proportionally as prevalent as diary.
- praxulus 5y agoYou can only mature the calves if you can spare the milk, and you get a lot more calories from just drinking the milk. A cow produces roughly 40 times more calories worth of milk over its lifetime than you get from the beef from one animal. There's no way it would be similarly prevalent unless they were raising herds specifically for beef.
- rffrancon 5y ago> You can only mature the calves if you can spare the milk, and you get a lot more calories from just drinking the milk. Perhaps in the short term. But after 10 weeks calves exclusively eat grass. And after a year on grass the riginal 10 week dairy calorie investment is dwarfed by the beef fat calories produced. I think it comes down to land costs and labour costs. Most Irish land is only suitable for livestock. Rough grassland is cheap. And hand milking is labor intensive. The Dexter cattle breed originated in Ireland, is suitable for both dairy and beef, and is tough enough for harsh conditions. Scaling up on beef male cattle makes sense if the grassland is available.
- watwut 5y agoThat 0.5 calve per cow would amount to rare. Plus, meat is prseved in form of sausage or dry meat - not steak or raw form.
- dustintrex 5y agoIn Scandinavia, which is nearly as potato-heavy as Ireland, turnips were a primary staple crop before the potato came around, so much so that in much of the world the rutabaga, a large version of the turnip, is known as a "swede". I would be surprised if this was not the case in pre-1600s Ireland as well. FWIW, in nearby Scotland "neeps and tatties" (turnips & potatoes) is still the canonical accompaniment to haggis.
- noneeeed 5y agoOh, my goodness, the whole turnip/swede thing has always confused me, but never enough to investigate as I don't eat them very often.
- yesbabyyes 5y ago> the rutabaga, a large version of the turnip, is known as a "swede". And "rutabaga" is from "rotabagge", the dialectal word for turnip in the region of Småland, from where the majority of Swedish immigrants to North America came (over 1 million Swedes emigrated to North America in the second half of the 19th century).
- celticninja 5y agoI knew what a swede was and had heard the term rutabaga, just never knew they were the same thing.
- dustintrex 5y agoTIL!
- RandallBrown 5y agoAnd here I thought Småland was just a cute name for the kids area at Ikea.
- fifilura 5y agoIt is actually somewhat suitable. Not only because "små" means small in swedish. But also because the 1800s version of the ball-pit consisted of lots of round pebbles, put there particularly in Småland by some evil ice-sheet-wielding mastermind, that the kids played with by carrying them from the barren Smålandish fields.
- rangoon626 5y agoThis continuing to propagate this stereotype is offensive to Irish people, such as myself. Why was this allowed to get posted here, Dang?
- fenderbluesjr 5y agoI'm Irish.. what is offensive about it? Potatoes are a big part of our culinary history
- stanford_labrat 5y agoI’m Irish as well…my family’s food joke is that nothing grows in Ireland except: milk, fish, and potatoes (and meat, if you’re lucky!)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raffraffraff 5y agoI don't get it either, and I'm also Irish (born here, lives here all my life)
- ninechars 5y agoI'm Irish. I didn't know this stuff. I found it interesting. Calm down kid.
- lljk_kennedy 5y ago
- fy20 5y ago> There was drinking milk, and buttermilk, and fresh curds, and old curds, and something called "real curds," and whey mixed with water to make a refreshing sour drink This sounds a lot like Lithuania today. If you go into most supermarkets the milk products section is usually bigger than the produce section. They also like potatoes. Usually served with milk products...
- ramesh31 5y agoThe population of Ireland was actually greater in 1840 than it is today [0]. It's hard to overstate just what a catastrophic event the potato famine was. [0] https://www.mapspictures.com/ireland/history/ireland_population.php https://www.mapspictures.com/ireland/history/ireland_populat...
- silisili 5y agoRather interesting, I remember reading that humans could generally survive off a diet of only milk and potatoes years ago. Of course sarcastically I immediately thought 'mashed potatoes are a superfood then.' Can't find the exact source now, but this one will do - https://www.straightdope.com/21343924/could-i-survive-on-nothing-but-potatoes-and-milk https://www.straightdope.com/21343924/could-i-survive-on-not...
- malkia 5y agofrom relatively lower carb, to quite the high carb!
- andygrd 5y agoThis whole thread is straying very close to a lot of anti-Irish racist tropes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoI thought that all Northern European food has been highly milk based for thousands of years, hence the Roman insult of "Butter eaters": https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-milk https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-milk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28532968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28532968
- _xnmw 5y agoAlso: It was butter, the Japanese thought, which made Europeans so peculiarly rank: bata-kusai they called them (using the English word for the foul substance): “butter-stinkers." The terms Bata-kusai, “stinking of butter,” is still a derogatory term for things obnoxiously Western. > http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/countries-japan.html http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/countries-japan.html
- WalterBright 5y agoPeople smell like what they eat. People who eat the same stuff you do, don't notice that you smell.
- maxerickson 5y agoEuropeans also tend to have more apocrine sweat glands than Asians. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/body-odor-asians-and-earwax https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/body-odor-asia...
- biofox 5y agoWell... now I feel extremely self conscious.
- loonster 5y agoI used to work with a very obese man doing blue collar work. When he sweats, he smelled like a deep frier.
- irrational 5y agoI want to seen an article like this for every food culture that is now heavily associated with foods from the Americas. Italy without tomatoes? No chilis? No beans? No corn? Etc. No potatoes means no vodka for the Russians.
- hohloma 5y agoRussian vodka is made from wheat.
- irrational 5y agoReally? Now I’m wondering why I thought vodka came from potatoes?
- phonypc 5y agoYou can make vodka from pretty much anything, and there are potato vodkas. Just not the most common.
- OJFord 5y agoThe Portuguese brought chillies to India from SA, before which they used black pepper for (obviously milder) heat. That was a bit of a 'mind blown' moment for me when I saw it on Raja, Rasoi, aur apni Kahaaniyaan (kings, kitchens, and their stories^) - quite a nice food/history/culture programme, each episode being a different region in India. (^to save someone pointing it out, it's actually 'king, kitchen, and his [or its] stories', I just thought that sounded more awkward, and confuses my description of it being a different region, sometimes king, food, culture etc. each episode.)
- raffraffraff 5y agoIndian. Imagine an Indian menu without baigan, aloo, chili peppers or rich tomato based sauces (chana masala).
- Lio 5y ago> though the reliance on milk meant that beef was a rarity Something fishy about that statement. Here’s the thing about cows, they cone in two sexes. If you drink a lot of milk you’ve got to keep a lot of cows pregnant. You only need a few bulls that. That means you got to do something with the male calves you don’t need for milk and don’t want to feed. They don’t magically disappear. They either eat them as veal calves (minus the crate) or eat them as bullocks.
- i_am_proteus 5y agoMale cattle were castrated and used as draught animals ("oxen") in many European societies. Either way, dairy cattle and draught cattle would get butchered and eaten at end of useful life, unless they died of disease. And there was also plenty of cattle raised for food in the areas that had the land for it.
- dekken_ 5y agothey might have not owned a bull but rented one when needed.
- karatinversion 5y agoBut they still get half their calves with no long term future as dairy cows - so someone will end up eating most of them.
- watwut 5y agoThat would give you the rare meat. No one claims they were vegetarians. But, if they killed and eate 0.5 young males per cow per year, that would make the meat available once per year per cow. They could dry it or make sausage or whatever, but that does not make it a lot.
- progre 5y agoGood thing, there is this other animal that basically eats garbage and shits fertilizer. The byproduct of this is a surpus of pork a few times a year.
- cyocum 5y agoFor those who want more on this topic, you will want to read Early Irish Farming by Fergus Kelly (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/462769441 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/462769441) and Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 by Aidan O'Sullivan, et al. (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1257790078 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1257790078).
- tummybug 5y agoI'm Irish, there still exists a lot of pride for potatoes here. I have a small allotment here as part of a communal garden and each spring there is probably more excitement about the potatoes crops than any other. People want to know what types you are planting, how early to put them down, tips for managing damage from a late frost etc. Not to mention it really is a productive crop and really can last all winter when stored correctly and you can be self sufficient for "spuds" from a relatively small sized plot.
- chrisseaton 5y agoYou have a potato theme park don’t you?
- knolan 5y agoIt’s a potato crisp (US:chip) theme park. https://taytopark.ie/ https://taytopark.ie/
- xor99 5y agoTayto was the first/one of to infuse the flavour into the crisp (US:chip). Before that there were little salt packets that you sprinkled. The guy who invented the process was nicknamed "Spud" Murphy.
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoTaytos cheese and Onion crisps are the finest Potato chip I have ever eaten.
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoFloury Irish potato varieties are among the best in the world. Once you taste them you can’t go back to waxy potatoes.
- phenkdo 5y agoHonest question, not meaning to be offensive or hurtful at all. I know how raw the wounds of the famine are etc. How do historians objectively - provided there is one - view the British empire's involvement in Ireland over much of the last millennium? Was it particularly repressive vis-a-vis other medieval empires in their dominions/spheres of influence?
- mkmk 5y agoNot an exact answer, but I heartily endorse the /r/AskHistorians/ subreddit for these types of questions. It is moderated quite differently from the rest of Reddit, and questions like this are answered in-depth. There are several threads on the Irish Potato Famine that may answer a subset of your question.
- Spooky23 5y agoIt was colonialism, with all of the attributes associated with it. Irish were seen as a lesser people and various phases and the machinery of empire acted appropriately. IMO it is a similar story to India in many ways. The Brits leveraged and undermined the existing power structure and extracted value at whatever cost deemed appropriate. Was there some “benefit”… at some level yes. Were there atrocities and disgusting levels of suffering without the consent of the governed? Yes.
- uptime 5y agoThere is a very interesting podcast on the Irish/Indian overlap. The Irish themselves are not spotless but there was some support. This duo does well researched stuff and helps a lot if you are interested in Brexit and NI. https://www.theirishpassport.com/podcast/ireland-and-india-assassins-of-empire/ https://www.theirishpassport.com/podcast/ireland-and-india-a...
- Spooky23 5y agoThank you. This is one of those interesting and obscure areas of history. Appreciate the link!
- 5y ago
- loonster 5y agoAnyone know of a good milk recipe book?
- beaconstudios 5y ago> from the 12th century on, there are records of butter flavored with onion and garlic, and local traditions of burying butter in bogs. > Grains, either as bread or porridge, were the other mainstay of the pre-potato Irish diet What's your favourite Irish food? Mind's garlic bread.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago> In 1690, one British visitor to Ireland noted that the natives ate and drank milk "above twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest for the most part love it best when sourest." He was referring to bainne clabair, which translates as "thick milk," and was probably somewhere between just straight-up old milk and sour cream. Today, "bainne clabair" ("soured milk" according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clabber_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clabber_(food)) is called clabber. It's basically a kind of very acidic yogurt made with mesophilic (room temperature) fermentation by the lactic acid bacteria that are naturally present in raw milk. You just leave a jar of raw milk out for the night and in the morning, you enjoy your clabber. Or get food poisoning, if you're unlucky :P Edit - you can also make clabber, more safely, with kefir and pasteurised milk. Kefir normally makes a kind of very runny yogurt but, depending on the milk, you can get a very firm yogurt instead. In my experience, non-homogenised milk of good quality (preferrably from grass-fed cows) and, interestingly, UHT milk, clabber well. UHT milk kind of makes more sense: it's already undergone the heat treatment necessary to make yogurt and all it's missing is the acid produced by lactic acid bacteria. Normally, this is done relatively quickly by thermophilic bacteria (Lactobacilus Bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus) at 45 degrees C, but a longer fermentation at room temperature with mesophilic strains can have the same effect. I, anyway, have made plenty of kefir-clabber this way, and also a few cheeses. If you collect the clabber and drain it in a cheesecloth, you can then form it and even age it. I've aged a couple of (tiny) wheels for up to four months and they were not bad, just a bit strong.