Adjective
Pronunciation: kay-doo-kuh’-lahn
Tasteless with a hint of bitterness. No strong sensations from the tongue; no one taste is dominant. Reflects a small difference in taste perception. Compare this with the concept of meishiamu (“taste that lacks its essence”). 

Keidukulan can be translated as “tasteless,” but it is more the tastelessness of a well-made, neutrally flavored white bread than of water. The term applies to fluids that are relatively neutral in taste. Manyatta milk is always suffused with the complex tastes of fermentation, fused with the flavors and aromas of the burnt botanicals used to sterilize the lmala (milk container). If you are used to milk with a complex taste interplay between stages of fermentation and burnt botanicals, then milk without this will be perceived as keidukulan, lacking taste, or as being “raw.” 

Camel milk is perceived by many Samburu to be keidukulan by nature. The milk has a salty taste Samburu perceive to be “inside” the milk. Fresh camel milk, with its rich, sweet, and smooth flavor and texture, tastes flat to the Samburu but, to outsiders like me, it is the most delicious milk I’ve ever tasted. The next most keidukulan milk is cow. It does not have the salt within the taste. Cow milk becomes more keidukalan as the milk’s mouthfeel becomes thinner, as the milk becomes increasingly less fatty in the months following lactation. Goat and sheep milk have stronger, more distinctive tastes. 

All fresh milk, kule nairewa and kule nairobi, is, by definition, relatively keidukulan, because, while the milk may pick something up from even a short stay in a prepared lmala, the flavor is subtle compared with what the milk will become as it ferments. All store-bought kule is considered keidukulan. Tea lacking enough tea and sugar, thus lacking a rich taste, is keidukulan (tasteless). 

Milk is keidukulan when stored in a lmala “prepared” by rinsing in cow urine rather than with burning sticks, which is the urine shortcut used by murran (warriors) when they have milk-producing cows but are too far from a manyatta to get the communal milk that was traditionally left out for them in the lmala loolmuran in each manyatta ngaji. As today there are no longer large cow herds in the Samburu Lowlands, the custom of leaving out milk for the murran is no longer practiced. Fresh urine is understood to be sterilizing, so, besides being used to “clean” the lmala by murran, it is also used to clean wounds. Keidukulan is also used to describe the taste of cow urine; when young boys look after the cows, they sometimes drink cow urine where there is no water. 

Keidukulan may contain an astringent or bitter component. For example, alkaline water, which is fed to camels — although it may have kodua (bitter) and keisiicho (astringent like a lemon) components — is perceived as tasteless in the sense of keidukalan. 

“Some of these words, like kebebek and this one, keidukulan, you will find a very small difference. Keidukulan is no longer edible.” — Robin Leparsanti, Longhiro Lekudere, in conversation with William Rubel, April 1, 2016. 

Return to Milk Taste and Texture terms.

This is the draft manuscript of the Samburu Milk Project, © 2024 William Rubel.

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Published by William Rubel

I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.

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