History of yoghurt

There is evidence of cultured milk products in cultures as far back as 2000 BC. The earliest yoghurt was probably fermented spontaneously, perhaps by wild bacteria residing inside goatskin bags used for transportation. In the early 1800s, men used yogurt to clean their goats and sheep. Many women also used yogurt to wash their bodies and hair. Yogurt was the best known cleaning agent at the time[citation needed].

In the records of the ancient culture of Indo-Iranians (Iran and India), yogurt is mentioned by 500 BC. In this record the combination of yogurt and honey is called "the food of the gods".[6] Persian traditions hold that "Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt".[7]

The oldest writings mentioning yoghurt are attributed to Pliny the Elder, who remarked that certain nomadic tribes knew how "to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity".[8] The use of yoghurt by medieval Turks is recorded in the books Diwan Lughat al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Has Hajib written in the 11th century.[9][10] Both texts mention the word "yoghurt" in different sections and describe its use by nomadic Turks.[9][10] An early account of a European encounter with yoghurt occurs in French clinical history: Francis I suffered from a severe diarrhoea which no French doctor could cure. His ally Suleiman the Magnificent sent a doctor, who allegedly cured the patient with yoghurt.[11][12] Being grateful, the French king spread around the information about the food which had cured him.


Raita is a condiment made with yoghurt and popular in India and Pakistan.Until the 1900s, yoghurt was a staple in diets of people in the Russian Empire (and especially Central Asia and the Caucasus), Western Asia, South Eastern Europe/Balkans, Central Europe, and India. Stamen Grigorov (1878–1945), a Bulgarian student of medicine in Geneva, first examined the microflora of the Bulgarian yoghurt. In 1905, he described it as consisting of a spherical and a rod-like lactic acid bacteria. In 1907 the rod-like bacteria was called Lactobacillus bulgaricus (now Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus). The Russian Nobel laureate biologist Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, was influenced by Grigorov's work and hypothesised that regular consumption of yoghurt was responsible for the unusually long lifespans of Bulgarian peasants. Believing Lactobacillus to be essential for good health, Mechnikov worked to popularise yoghurt as a foodstuff throughout Europe.

Isaac Carasso industrialised the production of yoghurt. In 1919, Carasso, who was from Ottoman Salonika, started a small yoghurt business in Barcelona, Spain, and named the business Danone ("little Daniel") after his son. The brand later expanded to the United States under an Americanised version of the name: Dannon.


Tarator is a cold soup made of yoghurt and cucumber (dill, garlic, walnuts and sunflower oil are sometimes added) and is popular in Bulgaria.Yoghurt with added fruit jam was patented in 1933 by the Radlická Mlékárna dairy in Prague.[13] It was introduced to the United States in 1947, by Dannon.

Yoghurt was first introduced to the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, influenced by Élie Metchnikoff's The Prolongation of Life; Optimistic Studies (1908); it was available in tablet form for those with digestive intolerance and for home culturing.[14] It was popularised by John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where it was used both orally and in enemas,[15] and later by Armenian immigrants Sarkis and Rose Colombosian, who started "Colombo and Sons Creamery" in Andover, Massachusetts in 1929.[16][17] Colombo Yoghurt was originally delivered around New England in a horse-drawn wagon inscribed with the Armenian word "madzoon" which was later changed to "yogurt", the Turkish name of the product, as Turkish was the lingua franca between immigrants of the various Near Eastern ethnicities[citation needed] who were the main consumers at that time. Yoghurt's popularity in the United States was enhanced in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was presented as a health food. By the late 20th century yoghurt had become a common American food item and Colombo Yogurt was sold in 1993 to General Mills, which discontinued the brand in 2010.