Why Agatha Christie never made camel soufflé

Funny creatures have begun to appear in Somerset. Little herds of vicuna, llamas and guanaco, and other similar animals. They are farmed for various purposes, chiefly hair. We already have riding camels, but I am expecting camels to appear any moment as a dairy herd. What, can you drink camel’s milk? Certainly. The view of Dr Ulrich Wernery, a vet and microbiologist, is that it is ‘the nearly perfect animal product for humans’. This ingenious German has for 20 years been looking after the hawks, horses and camels of the Emir of Dubai, and I learn from the Financial Times that he has now assembled a herd of 500 milking camels to produce the stuff on a commercial scale.

Camel’s milk is top-hole because it has only half the fat of cow’s milk, has more Vitamin C and can be drunk by those unhappy children who are ‘lactose intolerant’ (I know of one case, and life is very hard for those so afflicted). What would Mark Twain have said about this? He said he had met many camels in Syria and found ‘they will eat pine knots or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had oysters for dinner’. In chapter 3 of Roughing It (my favourite book of his), he says he once watched horrified when a camel seized his overcoat ‘and examined it with a critical eye all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it’. Instead he ate the sleeves, first one then the other; then the velvet collar, ‘opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before’.