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Cottage Cheese
Put two quarts thick sour milk in a milk pan, place it on the back of range where it will not boil or simmer; allow it to remain there until the curd has separated from the whey. Lay a double square of cheese cloth over a bowl, turn in the milk, lift the edges and corners of cloth, draw them together, tie with a piece of twine and hang it up to drain. When quite dry, turn into a bowl; season with salt and mix with a silver fork, add sweet cream until of the desired consistency. Serve very cold with hot gingerbread.
This is clabbered-milk cottage cheese, made the farmhouse way: raw milk left to sour on its own and warmed just enough to break the curd. The method depends on a milk supply that no longer exists in most kitchens, and the specific reasons matter more than the technique.
- "Thick sour milk" means raw clabberThe recipe assumes unpasteurized milk that has soured naturally, thickening into clabber as its native lactic bacteria take over. That souring was the household's own rough safeguard, and it was never reliable — raw milk can carry Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli O157:H7, none of which are outcompeted dependably by souring, and none of which change the taste or smell of the clabber.
- Pasteurized milk will not do thisPasteurized milk will not do this reliably -- Left on the counter, modern pasteurized milk generally spoils rather than clabbering cleanly: pasteurization greatly reduces the native lactic bacteria that would otherwise dominate the souring, so whatever recontaminates the milk can grow unchecked. Substituting supermarket milk into these instructions is likely to produce spoiled milk rather than a usable curd.
- The temperature is deliberately too lowThe temperature is deliberately low -- "The back of the range where it will not boil or simmer" specifies only warmth well below a simmer, held for hours. Whatever that temperature actually was, it is a holding warmth rather than a kill step, and nothing in the recipe ever brings the milk to a safe temperature.
- Draining and storageHanging the bag to drain and then seasoning and mixing the curd adds further time at room temperature, and the finished cheese is eaten cold and uncooked. There is no point in the process where a pathogen introduced at the start would be destroyed.
- If you want to make cottage cheeseUse a current recipe built on pasteurized milk and a measured starter or acid, with stated temperatures. The pleasures described here — soft curd, salt, a little sweet cream, served very cold — survive that change intact.
- On the silver forkNot fussiness. Silver and wood were the non-reactive tools of the period; ordinary iron or tinned steel would have given the acid curd a metallic taste. Any modern stainless or plastic tool does the same job.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk yields well under a pound of drained curd, perhaps a cup or so once loosened with cream — two to three modest servings alongside the gingerbread.
Cottage cheese is generally said to have earned its name as the cheese a cottage could make, requiring no rennet, no press, no cave and no long waiting, only the milk that had gone thick in the pantry before anyone could drink it. Dairying households routinely turned clabber into fresh curd, known variously as pot cheese, smearcase or Dutch cheese depending on region and ancestry; the German-American Schmierkäse and the New England "Dutch cheese" are closely related fresh curd cheeses. The instruction to serve it very cold with hot gingerbread sets a cold soft dish against a hot spiced one, and a cheese made from milk that would otherwise be thrown out fitted a frugal economy exactly.