Word of Mouth: Clabber

Clabber, noun: soured milk

Back before there was baking powder to use as a quick leavener in baking, there was clabber. This was something that every farm wife or person with access to fresh milk could make, no additional ingredients necessary!

To make clabbered milk, the fresh, raw milk was simply left out at room temperature. Bacteria in the milk would start converting the lactose (sugars) into an acid, causing the milk to thicken and sour while also keeping it from actually spoiling. According to the Joy of Cooking, clabber is milk that has "soured to the stage of a firm curd, but not to a separation of the whey."

In baking, clabber would react with the baking soda to give baked goods a quick rise in the oven. It was also sometimes curdled further to make cottage cheese or simply fed to livestock as part of their feed.

We're speaking in past tense here because clabber isn't something that can be found or even made very easily anymore. It waned in popularity as baking powder (which doesn't require an acid to activate) became more commercially available and as regulations began to require that milk be pasteurized. The pasteurization process kills the bacteria necessary for this kind of souring.

With the popularity of raw milk on the rise, maybe we'll get to try clabber for ourselves one of these days. Until then, buttermilk is about as close as we can get to what clabber was probably like!

Has anyone ever made, tasted, or baked with real clabber?

(Image: LIFE Magazine via Google Images)

Comments (10)

YES!

There is nothing like it! Growing up my great grandmother was a true farm wife. She taught me how to milk the cow, shake a mason jar until the butter came out, pluck a chicken, take care of eggs and how to make a goose a friendly. (It was all in the marshmallows!) But clabber always fascinated me. At home, milk that was left out was practically the start of the plague. A huge no go zone. But at her house, she'd set a pail on the kitchen counter away from the windows. And I've never tasted cornbread like it! I wish she were still around now that I'm older. I could sure use her wisdom.

Yes I have! Anyone who can get ahold of raw, unhomogenized milk, cream, or cheeses needs to jump on the chance. The milk is a hundred times better for you, and when the milk begins to ripen (vs. spoil like pasturized milk) it's fantastic for a hundred different recipes. When the milk just starts to get a bit acidic it's wonderful in gravies and soups, a little more towards clabber and it gives a fantastic richness and complexity to baked goods and pancakes and the like. Raw unhomogenized milk will also make the best yoghurt, kefir, cottage cheese, labneh, or other soft cheese you've ever tasted -- and it's easy to do!

If you don't know where to get it, here is a really good resource for finding raw milk at

www.realmilk.com

And no doubt the origin of the brand name Clabber Girl... I always wondered where such a strange name came from...

I never really new what it was, what a great post! I always shudder a little at the Clabber Girl name because there's a terrible scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved that involves clabber. The English major in me is showing, isn't it?

The only time I'd ever heard of clabber (other than the brand name) was in Bridge to Teribithia. They make fun of the girl for eating clabber, excep she's really eating yogurt. Thanks for finally solving the mystery for me!

My grandmother used to love to eat a glass of clabbered milk with cornbreak broken up in it. And when I tried it, I found it was delicious.

Oops.. Should be "cornbread."

Clabber was mentioned in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, too - Harpo stops by to see Celie and has a glass of clabber with cornbread crumbled into it.

Oh yes! I may only be 55 years old, but I grew up on a 160-acre farm with goats. We had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing, and I learned to cook on the Oval wood cookstove (complete with warming oven and reservoir - those suckers cost around $5-7,000 now!!!) and iron with two sad irons, alternating back and forth (I am hooked on the Leman's Non-Electric Catalog!!!).

Yet, I digress...I always remember my mom pouring a gallon or so of fresh milk (we never used the term "raw" back then) into the base of a roaster, and letting it sit on the table overnight until it "clabbered". I always loved it with brown sugar sprinkled generously on top. Yogurt doesn't compare in flavor (though I never heard of yogurt until well after I was married in 1973). I have pined for a nice bowl of clabber for YEARS!!!

Yesterday, I found a store that sells raw milk, and I promptly bought a half gallon. At $4.49, that's VERY prohibitive, but I have since found a local farm that sells inspected raw milk and I have a gallon on order. I immediately tore up two slices of whole wheat bread and made myself a bowl of bread and milk...ahhhh, comfort food!!! I have also enjoyed several chocolate milks!!!

I thought that I had outgrown my taste for milk, which I thoroughly loved as a child and even as a young adult, until I got married and left home. I understand now; once I started drinking pasteurized milk, it lost my interest because it didn't taste right to me.

I CANNOT WAIT until I can make my first pan of clabbered milk!!!

In winter we feed some of our milk to the pigs. We keep several of our neighbor's sows to breed them during the coldest part of the winter. If I feed milk to our five pigs, they drink it faster than I can pour it. If I clabber the milk before I give it to them, they are happy and full on about a third the amount of milk.
I find using Clabbered milk for pancakes is very much to my liking.
As a side note, the first batch I did took four days to Clabber, since then, milk put in the same bucket with just a bit of yesterday's milk, will clabber in 12 hours.