The Real Taste Inside the Word 'Daigomi'

The world today is awash in things made of milk.

Cow's milk. The white curdled kind. The yellow kind you spread across bread. The cold, frozen, sweet kind. Even children take them into their mouths, near enough every day. To eat things made of milk is, in this country, the plainest matter of everyday life.

And yet — here is the thing.

For a long stretch of its history, this country went on through an age when almost no one touched anything made of milk. For close to a thousand years. A cow meant the strength to plow a field, the legs to haul a load. That you might draw its milk and make food of it — somewhere along the way, no one thought so anymore.

But before that. For the briefest while, there truly was an age when things of milk existed in this country. It opened like a flower, and then, softly, it was gone. The only one left who remembers, I suppose, is someone like me.

◇ ◇ ◇

The summer of 1013 (Chōwa 2). It happened in a quarter on the outskirts of the capital, where cattle were kept.

In those days I made my living walking from province to province, peddling small wares.

That day I had come to sell salt to the cowherds of that quarter. There was a kind of government office there that kept cattle for the court and handled their milk, and inside it they were making something strange. What they made, I was told, served the great folk of the palace as medicine, and stood as an offering on auspicious days. For a man like me, who walked the provinces trading, it was a matter from far above the clouds, with no thread to connect it to my life.

Though it was the very height of a summer's day, inside that hut alone the air hung thick and hot; the fire there, they said, was never let to die the whole year round. Into a great pot set on the earthen floor they poured fresh-drawn cow's milk, brimming full. And then, over a low flame, they boiled it down — a slow, murmuring simmer that went on until you could lose your senses waiting. The white steam rising off it gathered against the low ceiling and fell back, drop by drop, like sweat.

The one keeping watch was a single old cowherd, his back bent with age. A wooden paddle in his hand, he sat there before the pot, and did not stir from it.

"Hard at it, I see," I said, and without lifting his eyes from the pot the old man answered.

"This here — take your eye off it a moment, and it catches on the bottom directly. Let it scorch, and a whole summer's labor is ruined outright. So I sit like this, morning to night, stirring."

As it boiled, the milk in the pot dwindled, little by little, in bulk. What had begun thin and steaming grew slowly deeper in color, throwing up a white froth as it went. Before long the thing that had been white as snow turned a pale amber, and thickened, until it drew a thread from the wooden paddle.

All around hung a smell I had never met before, thick enough to lean on. Sweet. And with it, a deep, roasted fragrance. It was as though the sweetness of the milk had been simmered slowly down over that low flame and sealed up tight inside. The back of my nose twitched despite me. To one who had shouldered bales of salt and walked nothing but sweat-stinking roads, that smell was almost more than I could bear. The old man seemed long since grown used to it, and only worked his paddle on, in silence.

"What sort of food is this, then?" I asked.

"It is called so," the old man said — a thick, sweet paste boiled down from the milk of cows. "A thing that goes into the mouths of the high and noble folk of the capital. Serves as medicine too, they say; an auspicious delicacy. Not the sort of thing that ever passes lips like ours, mind."

◇ ◇ ◇

After boiling the best part of half a day, there remained at last, at the bottom of the pot, only the smallest lump of amber.

All that milk, poured in so brimming full, come down to this little scrap. A whole pot of white, turned into a piece of amber you could hold in one palm. I could not help but stare.

The old man scraped up with the tip of his paddle a single flake of it, crusted to the rim of the pot, and held it out to me.

"This bit's a leaving — no use for what goes up to the authorities. Only fit to be thrown out. Well — will you have a lick of it?"

I took it into my mouth.

—It melted.

The moment it lay on my tongue it crumbled softly apart, and a deep sweetness spread, seeping outward. The hardened thing was melting, slowly, in the warmth of my body. It tasted as though someone had gathered up only the very best of the milk, pressed it tight together, and boiled it firm. Not sweet alone. Far back behind it lay a faint salt, and that roasted fragrance, and they stayed on the tongue and would not go. Even after I had swallowed it down, a rich remnant of sweetness lingered faintly in my mouth, and settled in to stay. That such a taste should exist in this world, I thought.

"Good, isn't it," said the old man, and his wrinkled face creased into a small smile. "They say there's a thing finished up more painstakingly still, and that one's called daigo — a yet richer dairy delicacy, the very summit of milk. A taste, so I hear, you'd scarce believe belonged to this world. Though I've never had it past my own lips. Nor rightly know how it's made."

I resolved that I would not forget that taste. For some reason, I felt it strongly — that I must not.

A whole summer this old man had spent murmuring it down, into one tiny lump of amber. And its finest part, the part he himself would never once taste, would be carried off into the far inner rooms of a palace. Even so, every year, when summer came, he would sit like this and keep his silent watch over the pot, so I was told. Only stirring, so as not to let it scorch.

As I left, I turned and looked once more at the hut. Under its low eaves, the old man's back blurred faintly away beyond the steam. Praised by no one, tasting nothing of it himself. And still that man would sit before that pot, next summer, and the summer after that. For some reason, I could not forget the sight of that back for a long while after.

◇ ◇ ◇

Then long years went by.

The age fell into disorder; the fields ran to waste; war followed upon war. It grew hard enough merely to keep the cattle alive, let alone to draw their milk. As the teaching of the Buddha struck deeper root, the killing of living creatures, and the handling of their bodies, came little by little to be shunned. The custom of drawing milk, and that office where they boiled the so — with no single cause you could point to, several reasons tangling together, quietly, before anyone marked it, they faded away.

I watched it go, all of it, from off at the edge of things — watched the whole of that vanishing.

The last time I chanced to pass that quarter, there was no pot any longer, and no cattle. Nor any of that sweet smell of the slow simmer. Only the summer grasses, run wild and rank. I stood there a while, searching the back of my nose for a smell that was no longer there.

For hundreds of years after that, the people of this country all but ceased to touch anything made of milk. It would be a long, long time before curdled white milk and the yellow spread came to this country again — not until far, far later, in the new world that I know.

Now, only the word daigomi is left — meaning the finest part of a thing, its choicest savor. Trace it back, some say, and it came from that old name for the summit of milk. But the truth of it, no one knows anymore. For there is no one left alive who knows that it was once the taste of an amber lump, boiled down across a whole summer.

The taste was forgotten, and only the word remained.

Now and again, I remember. That summer, on the outskirts of the capital. The rich, sweet smell of milk that a bent old man, with one wooden paddle, simmered slowly down.

---