In many new food preparations of value, milk powder is filling a long-felt want. Dissolved in 8 or 9 times as much water, milk powder makes a liquid almost identical with pasteurized fresh milk.
It has already been mentioned under the chapter on “Cream” and under “Ice Cream” how skim milk powder and unsalted butter, emulsified in a suitable amount of water or milk, make an excellent material for ice cream.
CONDENSED AND EVAPORATED MILK
Milk cannot be boiled down in a common open kettle or steam boiler without being scorched. Evaporating or condensing is therefore usually done in a vacuum pan at a low temperature. Condensed to one-third of its volume and excluded from the air by canning, milk will keep well for months, and has many uses as a substitute for fresh milk. Often sugar is added as a preservative, and where sugar would be added anyway, as in coffee, ice cream, etc., this is unobjectionable.
For purposes where sugar is not wanted, unsweetened condensed or evaporated milk is on the market, so carefully made that the taste of the original milk is hardly changed at all by the process. When water is added in the proportion of two parts of water to one of the evaporated milk, the fluid obtained excels even that from milk powder in its resemblance to fresh milk.
WHEY
Whey is a by-product in cheesemaking. Usually it is fed to hogs and especially together with grain or bran it makes an excellent food for them. But whey is also prepared for human food. In the hospital or in the home it serves as a substitute for milk when a mild diet of easily digested food is temporarily required for a weak stomach. For such purposes it must not be allowed to become acid as in cheesemaking, but should be prepared as the chief product from sweet new milk or freshly separated skim milk. The sweet milk is set with rennet—one Junket Tablet, dissolved in cold water, to a quart of milk—at a temperature of 90° to 100° F. As soon as a firm curd is formed it is carefully broken up and transferred to a strainer of cheese-cloth. Unless it is to be used at once, the whey strained off should be immediately cooled to 50° or lower. If left at a higher temperature it will soon become sour. A teaspoonful of limewater to a quart, or a pinch of soda, will help to keep it sweet. Still, in any event, it should not be kept long, but prepared fresh when required.
CHAPTER IV
Milk as a Food
Milk is first of all the food for the young,—until a certain age the only food, and a perfect food. It contains but little refuse or waste and is under favorable conditions almost wholly digestible.