What's all this Clabber about?

(The following is a post from a guest blogger. Not just your ordinary guest blogger, but a person I would like to put into the category of a quintessential  Southerner. Very proud, and a great resource for me when I want to get the Southern perspective on anything. We have talked many times on many subjects, Yankee vs. Rebel, North vs. South. The civil war, Gone with the wind, Mason & Dixon, Dukes of Hazzard  and much more.

So I give you, from my Southern pal and all around good guy.....Berkeley  Clayton and a blog post on)..

Glabber!

I will start at the beginning…. With the cow.  When I was about 8 or 9 I would get up early in the morning like 5:00 a.m. and go with my grandfather out to milk the cow.  (Yankee - when I was 8 or 9 I did not see 5:00am once!) This was way cool when you are that young.  You got to drink coffee with lots of cream and sugar and help milk the cow yourself. 

My grandfather would take a pan of warm water and a wash rag to wash the cow’s bag before he milked her.  I would get to carry the stainless steel 10 quart water bucket that the milk went into.  He had two buckets for milk, one for milking and one for pouring milk into. When he went into the shed where the cow was locked up, he would talk to her so she would not get agitated before being milked. This was a gentle old cow and you could pet her like a cat or dog.  He would pull his three legged stool over and sit down and wash her bag.  I pulled my stool over to and got ready to milk.  He would take his hand and push on her back leg so she would back it up so he could milk while she was eating.  I would grab one teat (Yankee - hold on now Berkeley, this is a family blog!)  and he would grab the other.   I lay my head against her belly and milked.   Be sure not to let the tail hit you in the head when she swatted at the flies.

Of course I could not do it as fast as he could and it took about 15 minutes to fill the bucket.  He did that every day.

After the bucket was full he carried it into the house, placing a cloth and a strainer over the other milk bucket, poured what we had just milked into the second bucket.  It sat there while the first one was washed and put away.  Then he would take the milk and pour it into 3 or 4 half gallon jars, two of which I had the responsibility to take to my house every day either in the morning or at night.  I had to do it in the afternoon most of the time because I was in school unless it was summer time. That was my job and I hated it because it messed up my cartoon watching on TV.  I had to go get the milk just when....

............Deputy Dog was on.  That was a great cartoon, but I digress.

Now to the clabber.  Clabber comes from raw, unpasteurized milk or what comes directly from the cow.  (You can buy raw milk in Florida but you have to look for it.  Of course the Yankees who run things in Washington DC feel that it is not “safe”.  I drank raw milk until I was in college and it never hurt me, but again I digress.)  (Yankee - Berkeley keeps on digressing, is that a southern thang?) 

Granddaddy would take the blue enamel pan sometimes 2 depending on how much he wanted at that time and pour the milk into the pans, cover them with a clean dishcloth and leave them sitting on the counter.  When you do this, raw milk will sour which is what it is supposed to do.  Pasteurized milk on the other hand will rot which is why you can’t make clabber with pasteurized milk. 

After about 4 or 5 days ( Yankee - Days!!??) depending on the temperature in the kitchen, my grandmother would check the milk and if it was firm feeling and smelled sour she would taste it.  When set, clabber looks a lot like flan for any of you that have seen or know about flan. It is firm but not runny.  (It can also be firmer like cheese depending on how long you let it set up.) She would put the clabber in a glass bowl, cover it put it in the refrigerator to eat.

Clabber is vilest stuff you have ever put in your mouth!!   It makes me gag to this day just thinking about it.  My grandparents, great grandparents and my father would take a piece or two of corn bread and break it up in a glass, and taking cold clabber from the refrigerator, spoon it on the cornbread mix it up and eat it from the glass.  (A different take on this is to mix the cornbread with regular milk.  My father trained my children to eat saltine crackers and cornbread like that.  My half Yankee wife was appalled the first time she saw them eating that, saying what is that nasty stuff you are eating?)  That was just about the worse thing in the world.  You could smell that sour milk all over the house.  I tasted it one time and had to run outside and spit it out. My great grandfather would eat it with some sugar or cane syrup on it right from a bowl, just nasty stinking clabber. 

If you ever eat clabber you have to brush your teeth about 5 times to get the taste of sour milk out of your mouth.  You should try it sometime just to say you have been there and done that. 

(Yankee - The Clabber association is not very happy with you, Berkeley!)


Thank you, again  Berkeley!!