Yogurt

When we think of medieval foods, do we think of yogurt?  After all, it seems sort of New Age-y.  But it was one of the "foreign" foods that reached Europe during the Middle Ages, as discussed with other examples in my previous post.  Europe was never sealed off from the rest of the world, and if they hadn't gotten a lot of new foods from elsewhere, they might have been eating bread and dandelion greens and not much else.

Yogurt is basically fermented milk, fermented with Lactobacillus, a kind of bacteria that digests milk but doesn't cause disease.  It's quite easy to make, just heat the yogurt to the right temperature in the right conditions, and the bacteria go to work.  (These days commercial yogurt has the right bacteria in the right amounts mixed in, whereas medieval yogurt had to hope they were there.  Not knowing that bacteria existed meant they had to watch for their effect.)

Medieval people had cows but no easy way to store milk.  Pasteurization was not invented until the nineteenth century (which both sterilizes milk and extends its life.)  So milk either had to be drunk very fresh, or else made into butter and cheese, or else made into yogurt, which would last longer than fresh milk though not as long as butter or cheese.

Yogurt probably goes back to the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia), though there is a strong tradition that it was invented by the Mongols, who supposedly filled up their saddle bags with milk, which then thickened and fermented due to the heat of the horse and rider.  (I find this very questionable--how about you?)  The Mongols at any rate eat yogurt today, though the term "fermented mares' milk" may put off the squeamish.

Wherever it began, yogurt became widespread in antiquity in India and the eastern Mediterranean.  The Greeks seem to have eaten it, though calling it oxygala.   The Russians took it up, probably getting it from the Byzantines along with Orthodoxy.  The Turks, who moved into the Mediterranean basin in the eleventh century, were very fond of it and called it yoghurt.

Though yogurt was common in the Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages, northern Europe was slow to take it up.  One story says that it only became popular in France in the sixteenth century, when an Arabic physician cured the king of a digestive upset by feeding him yogurt.

Because the English and the Germans who were the primary settlers of the American Thirteen Colonies had not eaten yogurt at home, it was slow to reach the US.  It really only became common in the early twentieth century, being pushed as a healthful way to eat better and live longer by Mr. Kellogg, who also invented corn flakes (marketed for the same purpose).

Many now claim that yogurt is digestible even for all of those who are lactose-intolerant—which is a high proportion of a population that stops drinking milk once weaned from mother's milk.  It is also claimed that yogurt can restore a healthy bacterial balance in one's digestive system.  These may all be true, though there's still enough New Age-y overtone to American yogurt that one has to wonder.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.