If you didn’t have a cow you had to buy milk from the grocery store. A lot of people did not have a refrigerator and some, not even an icebox—milk had to be used up before it went sour in the summer time but in the winter you could put it outside on the window sill and it would sometimes freeze by morning. The frozen cream was like the best ice cream you ever tasted.
Drinking milk that was bottled by Dairy Maid in Greenville, Ohio was like drinking fresh milk on the farm—and it tasted better.
Mother poured the cream off the top of the milk and used it in baking and as cream for coffee. Once the cream was poured off the rest of the milk was consumed as it is today.
Lots of people would shake the bottle of milk to mix the cream in with the rest of the milk—essentially, that is homogenization—like shaking a bottle of milk to mix the cream on top in with the rest of the milk in the bottle.
Nobody bought more than one quart of milk at a time and that would last for several days. Finally, one day, pasteurization began; and shortly afterwards the milk was homogenized—the cream disappeared. The dairy heats milk to rid it of any organisms that might harbor diseases. Those two processes were supposed to be good but we thought it made milk taste awful. Milk never tasted the same after it was homogenized and pasteurized.
