I have a few snippets of information about making "thick milk" from milk
and Pinguicula vulgaris. This was discussed _quite_ recently on this list,
and I didn't read it until last week... so bear with me ;-) Peter Cole
<carnivor@bunyip.demon.co.uk> described his own experiments with P.
grandiflora on May 13, and it generated some reponse.
The milk we're talking about is called tatmjolk (or, with the correct
umlauts, etc - view in Netscape! -, tätmjölk), or tate
(täte). Another, modern, version is langfil (or correcly
långfil) which is available throughout Sweden (and I guess other
Nordic countries) in most grocery shops.
It tastes _somewhat_ like yoghurt, but is more stringy and "slimy", and
is often served with knäckebröd (hard bread) and some jam
(cloudberry is my favorite!). It is not so much a delicacy as it was a
neccessary precaution to preserve milk. Some like the taste, some don't.
Tate is traditionally, now also commercially, made of Penguicula vulgaris,
which in Swedish is tätört. P. vulgaris is very common in most of
Sweden, and more or less a weed up north. This means literally "Thickening
herb" in Swedish, which makes me suspect that the use of the herb predates
the naming, so to speak.
When visiting my wife's ralatives in the northern parts of Sweden, we asked
about this, and was told they actually made tate themselves quite recently.
Unfortunately these people didn't remember the exact formula (being quite
little when they made it).
They _did_ remember, though, that a thunder storm destroyed the milk, it
became useless! Is this connected to the Pings dislike of rain? Is there an
ingredient in the active, thickness forming substance that's
meteorologically sensitive?!?
Well. This was just my 2 ore (öre) - 2/100 of a krona - worth of tate
lore.
Best,
/abj
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Mr. Andreas Bjorklind, Laboratory for Library and Information
Science (LIBLAB), Dept. of Comp. & Info. Sci., Linkoping University,
S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden. Tel. +46 13 28 19 69 Mobile +46 70 540 63 83
Fax +46 13 14 22 31, Internet: abj@ida.liu.se, AOL: Bjorklind
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