From Fresh Curd to Wild Game: Dairy, Eggs and Meat

Quark is the plainest stop on the path: milk soured with lactic acid bacteria, strained once it curdles, and usually made without added salt. It is eaten across Baltic, Germanic and Slavic-speaking countries, and its drier cousin tvorog is used across the same regions.

Labneh takes yogurt one step further by straining out whey until it is thicker than Greek yogurt, then salting it. In the Levant it is a common mezze dish and sandwich filling, and straining also leaves it lower in sugar than regular yogurt.

Clotted cream needs no culture at all, only slow heat: full-cream milk is scalded and cooled so that cream clots on top, reaching at least 55 percent butterfat. Cornish clotted cream gained European Union Protected Designation of Origin status in 1998.

Gouda shows what time does to milk: curds are washed, pressed, brined and aged from one to thirty-six months, and Dutch producers grade it from young at four weeks to very old at twelve to twenty-one months. The name is generic worldwide, but Boerenkaas, Noord-Hollandse Gouda and Gouda Holland are protected.

The egg is the most widely eaten animal product on this path, and the chicken egg dominates: first harvested for food in Southeast Asia around 1500 BCE, with an estimated 62.1 million metric tons produced worldwide in 2009. Duck, ostrich and even fish roe are eaten too, far less commonly.

Century egg preserves duck, chicken or quail eggs for weeks to months in clay, ash, salt, quicklime and rice hulls, raising the pH to roughly 9 to 12. Despite the hundred-year name it is not aged anywhere near that long, and it has been recorded in Chinese cuisine since at least the 17th century.

Veal is the meat of calves, most of it from male dairy-breed calves that could not be used for breeding. In Canada milk-fed calves are typically slaughtered at 20 to 24 weeks, and the same animals supply calf stomachs, which are the source of rennet for cheesemaking, tying this stop back to the dairy ones.

Venison ends the path with the wild end of the animal kitchen. The word comes from the Latin venari, to hunt, and entered English as Norman French venaison after the Norman Conquest. It refers mainly to deer, or antelope in South Africa, and compared with beef it is leaner and finer in texture.