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its very small fat globules was extremely difficult before modern centrifuges.Sheep’s milk worked better, but was less cost-effective given the small amounts of milk per animal.) Most often it also underwent a slow simmering process, as forghee. The northerners took another tack by using cream (usually soured) rather than whole milk for churning and omitting the prolonged cooking. This process produced an entirely different substance, smooth and unctuous at ambient temperatures where ghee and other forms of clarified butter would be grainy, and also containing subtle flavor notes lost in clarifying. The downside of using cream was that you got a smaller amount of less flavorfulbuttermilk.
    The northerners’ butter was also a cooking fat as excellent in its own way as ghee—a fact of crucial importance, because the region lacked any source of edible oil comparable to the Mediterranean olive or Middle Eastern sesame seed. People could, of course, render lard, beef suet, or poultry fat to be used in cooking. But the process required amounts of time and fuel that butter churning didn’t. Once you had butter, you had a marvelously versatile food that could be incorporated into some kinds of rich bread and pastry doughs or spread on already-baked bread, melted over cooked foods as a sauce, worked into fresh skim-milk cheeses as an enrichment, or used as asautéing medium that imparted a lovely flavor to anything cooked in it. Its biggest drawback was that it went rancid easily if stored long without refrigeration. As for the buttermilk, it could be either a beverage in its own right or a cooking liquid (especially forporridges).
    The Northeastern Cow Belt also happens to be an unparalleled center for all kinds ofbrine-pickled vegetables and fruits, from sorrel and cabbage to apples and beets. Like sour milk, these depend onfermentation of carbohydrates tolactic acid (though the starting point is not milk sugar). The twokinds of lactic-acid products—bracingly sour pickles (or their brine) and smooth, more gently tart cultured milk orcream—make a wonderful marriage, especially when the pickles are garlicky. This magical combination has produced a large family of cold soups that are among the glories ofRussian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other cuisines. Like many yogurt dishes of the Middle East and India, they are a lesson in milk’s affinities with partners that few American cooks would have thought of a generation ago.
    Until modern times the Northeastern Cow Belt shared the two older milking regions’ general indifference to any kind ofripened cheese. For centuries almost no cheese was produced there other than the small fresh kinds that could be easily made at home. Of course, Jews faced the obstacle that puttingrennet in milk is almost automatically a violation of kashruth. (“Almost” because under certain convoluted interpretations not accepted by all, animal rennet can be judged to have lost its “meat” status.) And for everybody including Jews, a broader limiting factor was the absence of proven markets able to repay the sustained efforts involved in producing and selling aged cheeses—which brings us to what is in many ways the strangest of the world’s dairying zones.
THENORTHWESTERN COW BELT
    Geographically, this used to be the smallest of the major Old World regions where strong traditions of fresh dairy foods developed. But after some five millennia it suddenly ended up as the largest. Consequently it is enmeshed in snarls of contradiction-laced history.
    The core areas are northernGermany, the Low Countries, northernFrance, and especially the British Isles. In southern Scandinavia, eastern Germany and the western Baltic lands, France and Germany as far south as the northern Alps, and some of the old Austro-Hungarian domains, the zone shades into traditions more akin to the Northeastern Cow Belt or the Diverse Sources Belt. And before modern times the links with such eastern neighbors were stronger