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Butter was not available for love or money...Kurien's Amul Revolution was 3 decades into the future.
My grannie told my mom that the way to get butter out of milk was to first curdle it, pour water into the jug of curds, and spindle the damn thing away vigorously with twining hands for half an hour and more till something white separates as a mass attached to the wooden spindle, or the palms itched, whichever was earlier.
Since mom was busy in her kitchen tending to the urgent hunger of half a dozen school-going mouths, the duty of churning butter out of cow milk was dumped on Father's laps...literally. Mom said that in any case he was doing nothing during his half-hour sandhya vandan in the mornings, so why not do it productively.
Father was game for it...I was his only son...
But discovered that all his furious effort for all that while resulted only in a pitiable thimbleful of so-called butter which refused to be scooped out...it stuck to the wings of the spindle like glue...the fat was scooped away by hands by the Reddys before they let their milk out.
Grannie then advised my mom that nobody she knew ever got any butter out of Reddy's cow milk and so we should switch over to buffalo milk.
Mom was game for it but Father put his foot down...initially...as it always turned out.
Father's argument was that cow milk is healthy not only for easy digestion but also for the brain...it was one of those food fads based on color and race.
After all Muthukur cows were white (unlike the emancipated American ones that were brown...how now brown cow?)
Whereas buffaloes of Muthukur, tethered to their master's pegs, were as black as coal...some coal that is in the Supreme Court.
And inquiries revealed that buffalo milk was twice as costly as cow's...but rich in fat, proteins and lather.
So, there was an intense discussion on the trade-offs between cows and buffaloes.
Mom won, as usual...
And in a couple of days Father reconciled not by the economics but by the fact that his early morning coffee tasted wholesome now...a case in which the collaterals win over laterals, let us say.
And Father found that the churning took only half the time and muscular effort, but also yielded tangible results in the shape of a fistful blob of butter.
Everything was going fine except that I disliked the buffalo butter...try it...and you will find it as tasteless as blotting paper.
Amul Butter is something I devour nowadays given the chance which I am not given what with my cholesterol counts.
But Amul transforms what was insipid into what is sipid by the addition of salt and preservatives that taste better than the servatives...
And so I declined the butter treatment of Dr. Modi.
Mom suggested that the butter accumulated each day could be fried in her kadai and turned into ghee and we could stop buying yellowing and musty ghee from the market.
And I got two spoons of ghee instead of the regulation one spoon...the others were supplementing their lubricants with gin-gelly oil (now extinct).
Turning butter into ghee is a refined art as I came to know painfully. One day while mom, busy 'doing' the four hurricane lanterns of the family, asked me to look after the kadai on her chulha and keep a watch over the frying butter. And I kept a determined watch doing nothing about it.
When mom returned from her works she discovered that, instead of ghee, I got her something more akin to coal tar....I forgot to turn the chulha down.
But mom wasn't to be put down....those were costly days.
She merely scraped all the coal tar sticking to the kadai and did some witchery and turned it into what we called: 'goku' that was tastier than ghee...solid brittle tiny flakes that we broke up and mixed with rice and gluttoned vying with one another...
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Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 – 9 September 2012) was a
renowned Indian social entrepreneur and is best known as the "Father of
the White Revolution",[2] for his 'billion-litre idea' (Operation Flood) — the world's biggest agricultural development programme.[3]
The operation took India from being a milk-deficient nation, to the
largest milk producer in the world, surpassing the United States of
America in 1998,[4] with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11, which in 30 years doubled the milk available to every person.[5] Dairy farming became India’s largest self-sustaining industry.[6] He made the country self-sufficient in edible oils too later on,[7] taking head-on the powerful and entrenched oil supplying lobby.
He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention[8] of milk powder processed from buffalo milk[9] (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. His achievements with the Amul dairy led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him as the founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul's "Anand model" nationwide.[3]
One of the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work has alleviated millions out of poverty not only in India but also outside. Hailed as the "Milkman of India", Kurien won several awards including the Padma Vibhushan (India's second-highest civilian honour), the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award for community leadership.
He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention[8] of milk powder processed from buffalo milk[9] (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. His achievements with the Amul dairy led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him as the founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul's "Anand model" nationwide.[3]
One of the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work has alleviated millions out of poverty not only in India but also outside. Hailed as the "Milkman of India", Kurien won several awards including the Padma Vibhushan (India's second-highest civilian honour), the World Food Prize and the Magsaysay Award for community leadership.
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Dr Modi's ophthalmoscopic butter treatment for the star in my right eye landed our family in an early life crisis.
Muthukur had only cows, or excuses for cows, in 1953. The Great Bengal Famine was but a decade old and was succeeded by several AP famines and droughts in the 1950s. All the cows were owned by the rich Reddys of Muthukur, and their milkmen supplied cow milk to the households early every morning. They said it was cow milk and we believed it...for buffaloes were few and far between, in contrast to today's Hyderabad scenery where herds of buffaloes are showstoppers at every major arterial road including in the hi-tec city which was supposed to have been a vast buffalo farm before it turned hi-tec for want of space in the heart of the city.
The cows at Muthukur were as thin and ribby as I was then.
Muthukur had only cows, or excuses for cows, in 1953. The Great Bengal Famine was but a decade old and was succeeded by several AP famines and droughts in the 1950s. All the cows were owned by the rich Reddys of Muthukur, and their milkmen supplied cow milk to the households early every morning. They said it was cow milk and we believed it...for buffaloes were few and far between, in contrast to today's Hyderabad scenery where herds of buffaloes are showstoppers at every major arterial road including in the hi-tec city which was supposed to have been a vast buffalo farm before it turned hi-tec for want of space in the heart of the city.
The cows at Muthukur were as thin and ribby as I was then.
Butter was not available for love or money...Kurien's Amul Revolution was 3 decades into the future.
My grannie told my mom that the way to get butter out of milk was to first curdle it, pour water into the jug of curds, and spindle the damn thing away vigorously with twining hands for half an hour and more till something white separates as a mass attached to the wooden spindle, or the palms itched, whichever was earlier.
Since mom was busy in her kitchen tending to the urgent hunger of half a dozen school-going mouths, the duty of churning butter out of cow milk was dumped on Father's laps...literally. Mom said that in any case he was doing nothing during his half-hour sandhya vandan in the mornings, so why not do it productively.
Father was game for it...I was his only son...
But discovered that all his furious effort for all that while resulted only in a pitiable thimbleful of so-called butter which refused to be scooped out...it stuck to the wings of the spindle like glue...the fat was scooped away by hands by the Reddys before they let their milk out.
Grannie then advised my mom that nobody she knew ever got any butter out of Reddy's cow milk and so we should switch over to buffalo milk.
Mom was game for it but Father put his foot down...initially...as it always turned out.
Father's argument was that cow milk is healthy not only for easy digestion but also for the brain...it was one of those food fads based on color and race.
After all Muthukur cows were white (unlike the emancipated American ones that were brown...how now brown cow?)
Whereas buffaloes of Muthukur, tethered to their master's pegs, were as black as coal...some coal that is in the Supreme Court.
And inquiries revealed that buffalo milk was twice as costly as cow's...but rich in fat, proteins and lather.
So, there was an intense discussion on the trade-offs between cows and buffaloes.
Mom won, as usual...
And in a couple of days Father reconciled not by the economics but by the fact that his early morning coffee tasted wholesome now...a case in which the collaterals win over laterals, let us say.
And Father found that the churning took only half the time and muscular effort, but also yielded tangible results in the shape of a fistful blob of butter.
Everything was going fine except that I disliked the buffalo butter...try it...and you will find it as tasteless as blotting paper.
Amul Butter is something I devour nowadays given the chance which I am not given what with my cholesterol counts.
But Amul transforms what was insipid into what is sipid by the addition of salt and preservatives that taste better than the servatives...
And so I declined the butter treatment of Dr. Modi.
Mom suggested that the butter accumulated each day could be fried in her kadai and turned into ghee and we could stop buying yellowing and musty ghee from the market.
And I got two spoons of ghee instead of the regulation one spoon...the others were supplementing their lubricants with gin-gelly oil (now extinct).
Turning butter into ghee is a refined art as I came to know painfully. One day while mom, busy 'doing' the four hurricane lanterns of the family, asked me to look after the kadai on her chulha and keep a watch over the frying butter. And I kept a determined watch doing nothing about it.
When mom returned from her works she discovered that, instead of ghee, I got her something more akin to coal tar....I forgot to turn the chulha down.
But mom wasn't to be put down....those were costly days.
She merely scraped all the coal tar sticking to the kadai and did some witchery and turned it into what we called: 'goku' that was tastier than ghee...solid brittle tiny flakes that we broke up and mixed with rice and gluttoned vying with one another...
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