Lait ribot

Periodically I have a conversation with someone - usually American - about what one can use as a substitute for buttermilk. Generally we agree that we have never, or very rarely, seen buttermilk available on the supermarket shelves, yet it is an ingredient that certain recipes traditionally contain and our mothers or grandmothers seem to have used reasonably regularly. We agree that the easiest substitute is natural yoghurt thinned with milk, but we occasionally use milk that has gone sour or faiselle (like cottage cheese) that is past its best, just like our mothers and grandmothers would have. We suppose that the other possibility is using drinking yoghurt, but since none of us ever buy the stuff, we've never tried it. I've also used the whey saved from mozzarella cheese as a substitute for buttermilk in cakes.

Just recently I wanted to make soda bread and it suddenly dawned on me that I had read a post on Clotilde Dusoulier's excellent food blog Chocolate and Zucchini, yonks ago, about a Breton product called lait ribot. I see it in the supermarket as a regular item, in the refrigerated section along with the fresh milk, and my memory of Clotilde's description was that if it wasn't buttermilk, it was a very reasonable substitute.

Using the other half of the lait ribot to make cornpone.

It turns out that lait ribot is indeed a type of buttermilk. In the old days it was the traditional product, which was the creamy but low fat liquid left in the churn after you have made butter, deliberately fermented to increase its keeping qualities. (Lait is the French word for milk and ribot from the Breton word for a churn). These days the by-products of industrial scale butter making go into industrial scale 'not butter' spread making, along with various vegetable oils. Cultured buttermilk, or lait ribot, is now manufactured in its own right by adding a lactobacillus to milk to lightly ferment it, making it go slightly sour and curdled ie essentially, drinking yoghurt. Many French people would dry retch at the thought of drinking a glass of milk, but they adore a glass of lait ribot, especially if they are holidaying in Brittany.

Susan