A Bit of History

Milk is an opaque white liquid produced by the mammary glands of mammals*; indeed, female production of milk is (along with hair) one of the identifying characteristics of mammals. Milk is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals before they are able to digest other types of food, and early lactation milk helps transfer the mother’s antibodies to the baby. One of the important constituents of milk is a disaccharide sugar called lactose. For lactose to be digested, it has to be broken down in the small intestine into its simple sugar components, glucose and galactose. This is done by the action of an enzyme called lactase. The body’s production of lactase decreases significantly after weaning, albeit with considerable variance -- the sort of variance that evolution can act upon -- so that most adult mammals, including humans, lack lactase. This means that any milk they consume travels undigested through the gut and anaerobically feeds intestinal microflora who excrete hydrogen and methane, leading to bloating, cramps, and diarrhea. This condition in humans is called lactose intolerance.

Genes and culture co-evolve, however. Evolution and development interact. Thus in certain human populations that came to depend for nourishment on dairy products (at least on milk products that hadn’t been processed in some way to remove the lactose, like by fermentation or curdling ) lactose tolerance – the ability to digest milk as adults - has become quite common. Given the nutritional value of milk – from goats, cows, horses (or other mammals although no group that I know of has domesticated hippos, for example…) -- there is a fairly obvious ‘selective advantage’ for those that inherited this trait. In humans, the gene that codes for lactase, called LCT, is generally switched off after weaning. However a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) on chromosome 2 keeps the LCT gene working into adulthood. This turns out to be a dominant allele, and thus when there is a selective advantage for lactose tolerance, and wide use of milk, it can spread rapidly and quite thoroughly through the population. This evolutionary adaptation apparently happened independently some 5-10 thousand years ago in Northern Europe and the Middle East, as well as in some African tribes and in the Asian steppes (scientists are still debating where, when, and how often). And of course it has spread as populations from those areas have interbred with others. I’ve borrowed a map from Wikipedia’s article on lactose intolerance that shows its percentage (red means more intolerance, green more tolerance, grey is no data) in adult humans these days, and it turns out that intolerance is the rule, not the exception, over large parts of the globe. This may explain, for example, why Dairy Queen, 31 Flavors, and Ben’s would not find China, South Africa, or most of South America to be very good markets.

From the lactose intolerance page in Wikipedia.

Given that art to a large extent reflects the values of the artist (and the artist’s clients), one wouldn’t expect to find a whole lot of cow-shaped liquid holders from the Romans, or the Chinese, or the Incas, or American Indians; there are a few from ancient Egypt where the use of cattle for milk dates from the 4th C BC (and the goddess Hathor is sometimes depicted as a cow). However, apparently nobody gave much thought to fashioning something in the shape of a cow to specifically dispense milk and cream until sometime in the early 18th century when a few ceramic ones were made in Holland, and then in the mid -18th century when a Dutch silversmith named John Schuppe began to fashion silver ones for sale to the British gentry, tea with milk (and cocoa, etc) being as popular in London then as now.

Schuppe may not have been the first to produce silver cow creamers, but he does seem to have been the one who popularized them. They became ‘the thing’ in upper class British homes, and there are a good number of his still around today (I have 2, plus 3 modern copies); indeed it’s a Schuppe creamer that achieved notoriety in Sir P.G.Wodehouse’s 1938 classic The Code of the Woosters. If only the quite expensive London-bred silver cow creamers had become popular, it’s highly doubtful that the species would have spread as widely as it has…one can assume that the gene that codes for collecting silver cows is, so to speak, a recessive allele…In the great tradition of “upstairs-downstairs” however, what’s good for the master is good for the servant, and so as the silver ones proliferated, the potteries in Staffordshire began fashioning cow shaped creamers for the common folk. These became exceedingly popular – apparently a dominant allele to really stretch the analogy - and the manufacture of ceramic cow creamers quickly spread to other parts of the UK and to the continent. The only problem was that many of these early ones had creases and cracks where the milk got stuck (refrigeration and sanitation not being what they are today), resulting in not infrequent salmonella poisoning. Manufacturing processes soon improved however, and during the Victorian era (1837-1901) -- as depicted in this 1892 wood engraving from “Chatterbox” -- cow creamers became increasingly popular and wide spread, both for dispensing milk, and as souvenirs and subjects on spill vases.

For folks visiting the UK, the V&A has four lovely examples of Schuppe’s creamers (shown in the above picture of their postcard), and The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent has a magnificent collection of some 667 early pottery creamers collected over some 30 years by Mrs. Gabrielle M. Keiller and gifted to the museum in 1962. See http://www.search.staffspasttrack.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=21249 for a bit about that collection and early history.

* For those who care about ‘why’, see for example http://nationalzoo.si.edu/SCBI/SpotlightOnScience/oftedalolav20030714.cfm