From: oispeggy@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (Peggy Brown)
Subject: magical ingredient
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 14:59:00 GMT


Remember that discussion on sex-magick we had a few months ago?
About cakes of light, amrita, etc?  I'd been thinking about 
preserving some breastmilk and that discussion inspired me to 
do it.  It's a powerful ingredient for me and very rare, so I 
figured I'd better preserve it while I had the chance.

I thought about preserving it in alcohol, but decided that would 
be too cumbersome.  Plus wood-grain alcohol can't be used in
cooking.

I ended up turning it into a salt.  I mixed breastmilk with salt 
and baking soda until it made a wet paste then microwaved it, 
watching carefully.  Whenever the edges started to turn golden I 
would stop and stir it.  Eventually all the fluid evaporated, 
leaving a golden colored salt/powdered milk sediment.  I store it 
like salt and so far there is no sign it will go bad.  (It's been
about a week.)  This can be used in cooking, blessing a garden, or 
to charge you-name-it.  Very flexible and easy to work with.

I would have liked to produce powdered milk, but the milk scorches 
so easily by itself.  If anyone has suggestions for improvements, 
I'm interested.  Also, I'd like to call it something besides
"breastmilk salt."  Any suggestions for a name? 

- Peggy -
===

From: rjb@u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)
Date: 15 Mar 1994 17:53:03 GMT

[Quoting the above article about alcohol preservation.]
Perhaps simply vodka or everclear?  (Why would you want to use wood
alcohol?!) 

[powdered milk]
I think powdered milk is usually prepared by evaporation -- not using 
heat, but using vacuum.  I suppose the hose-attached-to-the-faucet method
would be pretty inefficient, and really run up your water bill; another
method is to put thin layers of liquid onto wide, flat plates, from which
the liquid might evaporate before it spoiled.  Then you might need a 
single-edged razor blade to scrape the residue from the plates.  Your 
method sounds quite sensible, though the microwaving seems unnecessary --
simply spreading the salt-milk mixture in a thin layer on plates should
be enough.  You could also use a very thick sugar paste, I should think.
Or you could add some binder to the sugar and make little pills -- any
book on pharmaceutical techniques (maybe Remington's?) should have lots
of neat ideas, the UB library should have at least one.

[naming]
How about some fun alchemical names?  "Lac virginis" is a venerable
alchemical ingredient ("virgin's milk"); you could go for "sal virginis"
(virgin's salt), "sal matris" (to be literal-minded), salt of the
wise, sal vitae (salt of life), something Liber Legistical like star-salt
(referring of course to Nuit etc), or (with a joke on your name & several
other traditional phrases) "salt pearls" or (better) "pearl salt".

                             Pear Salt
                          Do Not Serve With
                                Pork

 
could be the label on the bottle...

LeGrand