Sour milk - three Romanian pots

Having mentioned sour cream - an essential in Romanian cuisine - in two recent blips, I thought I'd show you the pot in which it is made traditionally. It's the one at the rear. Although it can be used to make sour cream it is more usually used to make sour milk - lapte acru or sana. No artificial agents, just leave it at room temperature -  as Miss Muffet must have done for her curds and whey - to go sour in the clay jug. You need 'raw' milk, ie unpasteurised. The resulting curds and whey can be beaten together, so the drink is often referred to as lapte bătut (beaten milk), a delicious refreshing drink; you can put sugar or, better, honey in it if you want to make it not so sour but I prefer it unsweetened. If you use pasteurised milk or heated milk and add other bacteria you're making yogurt (iaurt).

Although the focus is on the rear pot (both in a literal sense and photographically) I've included two pots of the unique black pottery made in the village of Marginea in the Romanian Bucovina as some of you liked the tiny one I blipped recently. These are just decorative (you can hopefully see the subtle decoration of shiny black on the matt black). We have a much larger one with a lid used to cook sarmale, similar to the Greek dolmas, stuffed vine leaves, though in Romania they will more often be stuffed pickled cabbage leaves and the herbs etc are different. Unfortunately we forgot to bring the pot back when we were in the camper in 2015 and it was too big to bring on the plane last year.

I used the legacy 50mm Zeiss Contax manual lens on the Fuji again for the pic. Not sure whether the pic qualifies for Flower Friday but I'll tag it FF20 in case.