Bizarre food【5】：Kumis

            I have been to Mongolia two years ago, Kumis made a good impression on me, I love it, though some people cannot get used to its taste. Kumis, also spelled kumiss or koumiss in English (or kumys, see other transliterations and cognate words below under terminology and etymology) is a fermented dairy product traditionally made from mare's milk. The drink remains important to the peoples of the Central Asian steppes, of Turkic and Mongol origin: Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Yakuts, Mongols and Kalmyks. It was also consumed by Baltic, Hungarian tribes.
Kumis is a dairy product similar to kefir but is produced from a liquid starter culture, in contrast to the solid kefir "grains". Because mare's milk contains more sugars than the cow's or goat's milk fermented into kefir, kumis has a higher, though still mild, alcohol content.
Even in the areas of the world where kumis is popular today, mare's milk remains a very limited commodity. Industrial-scale production of kumis, therefore, generally uses cow's milk, which is richer in fat and protein but lower in lactose than the milk from a horse. Before fermentation, the cow's milk is fortified in one of several ways. Sucrose may be added to allow a comparable fermentation. Another technique adds modified whey in order to better approximate the composition of mare's milk.

Mongolia  people are very hospitable!





Kumis is production of mare's milk：
A 1982 source reported that 230,000 horses were kept in the USSR specifically for producing milk to make into kumis.
A mare being milked in Suusamyr valley, Kyrgyzstan.
Rinchingiin Indra, writing about Mongolian dairying, says "it takes considerable skill to milk a mare" and describes the technique: the milker kneels on one knee, with a pail propped on the other, steadied by a string tied to an arm. One arm is wrapped behind the mare's rear leg and the other in front. A foal starts the milk flow and is pulled away by another person, but left touching the mare's side during the entire process.

In Mongolia, the milking season for horses traditionally runs between mid-June and early October. During one season, a mare produces approximately 1,000 to 1,200 kilograms of milk, of which about half is left to the foals.


Health
          In the West, Kumis has been touted for its health benefits, as in this 1877 book also naming it "Milk Champagne".
         Toward the end of the 19th century, kumis had a strong enough reputation as a cure-all to support a small industry of "kumis cure" resorts, mostly in southeastern Russia, where patients were "furnished with suitable light and varied amusement" during their treatment, which consisted of drinking large quantities of kumis. W. Gilman Thompson's 1906 Practical Diatetics reports that kumis has been cited as beneficial for a range of chronic diseases, including tuberculosis, bronchitis, catarrh, and anemia. Gilman also says that a large part of the credit for the successes of the "kumis cure" is due not to the beverage, but to favorable summer climates at the resorts. Among notables to try the kumis cure were writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, long-suffering from tuberculosis, checked into a kumis cure resort in 1901. Drinking four bottles a day for two weeks, he gained 12 pounds but no cure.