Colourful milk

In the Receuil des Médécines Vétérinaires of 1826 a description was given of the alterations of milk, mainly of its colour and taste, by Vallot.[1] It is an overview of the then known pathological changes of milk, and most of them are supposed to be caused by plants eaten by the animals. The translation and editing/summarizing of the text is mine. The Latin plantnames given in brackets are those given by Vallot.

1. Red milk, known for a long time, but the cause of this colour is unknown; one only knows that it has given rise to ridiculous fables and lamentable superstitions. Some agriculturists, attributing it to a disease of the teat, which is more soft, may have mentioned it as a result only; it remains for more precise observers to decide.

2. Yellow milk is produced, it is said, by kingcup (Caltha palustris) eaten by the cow; but this cause is doubtful.

3. Blue milk: the real cause is unknown. According to some agriculturists it has to be attributed to the eating of hyacinth (Hyacinyhus comosus).

4. Green milk is simply blue milk.

5. Non-coagulating milk is produced by the intake of the husks of green peas and of mint.

6. Bitter milk is given by cows when they eat absinth (Artemisia absinthium), alpine milkweed (Sonchus alpinum), and leaves of the artichok (Cynara scolymus), and by goats who have eaten a large quantity of shoots of elder (Sambucus nigra) and foliage of potatoes (Solanum tuberosum).

7. Unappetizing milk is produced by cows in Upper Canada, fed with turnips, instead of [squach][2]; only mentioned here to remember.

8. Milk with the taste of dung. In the Northern countries, when cows eat seaweed, their milk may contract a taste of dung.

9. Garlic milk. This type of milk is well known; it is due to plants with a smell of garlic eaten by the cows, and the number of those plants is considerable.

10. Milk without taste and the butter of it with a colour of lead is given by cows eating horsetail (Equisetum fluviatile).

11. Sweetend milk from meadows in Les Landes is given by cows that graze on alpine clover (Trifolium alpinum).

12. Red butter. This colour is given to butter by the currant-juice of asparagus; but it is not yet known whether the samples taken from the butter, at our markets, that have this colour are constantly due to this cause.

Monsieur Vallot may have been a collector of agricultural data about milk. According to the subtitle of this paper he presented this list at a session of the Académie des Science in Dijon in 1825. The same subtitle also mentions that this list has been extracted from a medical bulletin. Like so many learned men in his days he may have been eager to present his collection  to the society of which he was a member.

The collection does not show a clear pattern, except that most but not all of the alterations are caused by plants. Some of them he only knows from reports of others (Canada), some causes are assumptions only like the yellow and the blue milk, and the first alteration, the red milk, is placed in the middle of an apparently ongoing controversy about the cause that may be a disease. What he does not mention is, that, even in his days, the red colour of the milk has been attributed also to blood in the milk because of an inflammation.

Nevertheless, Vallot stood in a tradition of classifying abberrations of milk as a separate class of pathology, subdivided in smaller groups, of which qualitative alterations, such as blue, souring, bitter, tough and watery milk were seen as caused by the eating of plants.

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[1] M[onsieur] Vallot. Du lait considéré dans ses alterations physiologiques. Receuils des Médécines Vétérinaires, 3, 1826, 171-173

[2] I was unable to find a translation for the name of this plant; some googling suggested that it should be read as squash and may be a pumpkin. Maybe readers (from Canada?) can help me.