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CURD OR COTTAGE CHEESE
Set a gallon or more of clabbered milk on the stove hearth or in the oven after cooking a meal, leaving the door open; turn it around frequently, and cut the curd in squares with a knife, stirring gently now and then till about as warm as the finger will bear, and the whey shows all around the curd; pour all into a coarse bag, and hang to drain in a cool place for three or four hours, or over night if made in the evening. When wanted, turn from the bag, chop rather coarse with a knife, and dress with salt, pepper, and sweet cream. Some mash and rub thoroughly with the cream; others dress with sugar, cream, and a little nut-meg, omitting the salt and pepper. Another way is to chop fine, add salt to taste, work in a very little cream or butter, and mold into round balls. POTATOES A LA LYONNAISE are much simpler than the name implies. Ruba lump of good butter over the inside of a clean, smooth, slightly warmed skillet, turn in some cold boiled potatoes cut up, add pepper, salt, a little chopped parsley, and perhaps the least bit of onion very fine. Shake from time to time and see that they do not brown. "Fried white" is the accepted slang in fashionable hotels for this very elegant mystification in the art of potato cooking. If, for your stomach's sake, you should prefer to have your potatoes actually fried a savory crisp brown, drop in smoking hot lard or nice drippings (never in butter, as it scorches too quickly; warm up or sauti-fry in a well-greased frying-pan-in butter, but fry, or rather boil, in lard or drippings).
STUFFED BEEFSTEAK is as nice for dinner as a much more expensive roast, and it can be prepared from a rather poor flank or round steak; pound well, season with salt and pepper, then spread with a nice dressing-may use some of the bread-crumbs-roll up and tie closely with twine (which always save from the grocer's parcels), put in a kettle with a quart boiling water, boil slowly one hour, take out and place in dripping-pan, adding water in which it was boiled, basting frequently until a nice brown, and making gravy of the drippings; or you may put it at once into the dripping-pan, omit the boiling process, skewer a couple slices salt pork on top, add a very little water. baste frequently, and, if it bakes too rapidly, cover with a dripping-pan. It is delicious sliced down cold.
HOW TO MAKE NICE GRAVY is a problem lem many housekeepers never solve. Remember that grease is not gravy, neither is raw flour. Almost any kind of meat-liquor or soup-stock, from which all fat has been removed, may be made into nice gravy, by simply adding a little seasoning and some thickening; if browned flour is used for the latter, the gravy will require but little cooking, but when thickened with raw flour, it must cook until thoroughly done, or the gravy will taste like so much gummy paste. It is best to brown a quart of flour at a time. Put in a skillet, set in the oven or on top of the stove, stir often until it is a light-brown, put into a wide-mouthed bottle, cork and keep for use. All gravies should be well stirred over a rather hot fire, as they must be quickly made, and must boil, not simmer.
POTATO FLOUR is an addition to many kinds of breads, cakes, and puddings, making them more light and tender. Wash, peel, and grate into an earthen pan, filled with pure, soft cold water; when the water begins to clear by the settling of the pulp to the bottom, pour off the water and add more, stir pulp with hand, rub through a hair sieve, pour on more water, let stand until clear, pour off and renew again, repeating several times until the farina is perfectly white and the water clear. The air darkens it, and it must be kept in the water as much as possible during the process. Spread the prepared farina before the fire, covering with paper to keep it from dust; when dry, pulverize it, sift, bottle, and cork tightly. Potato jelly may be made by pouring boiling water on the flour, and it will soon change into a jelly; flavor and sweeten to taste..
STEWS, if properly prepared, are very palatable. If made from fresh meat, they should be immersed in boiling water at first, and then placed where it will simmer slowly until done; season, add thickening, and flavor with an onion, or a tea-spoon of curry powder; or prepare a poor beefsteak by first trimming off all the fat and cutting in convenient pieces, fry in butter or drippings to a nice brown on both sides, then add a little sliced onion, carrots, or turnips, seasoning, a tea-spoon Chili-sauce, and one pint soup stock, or water; stew gently two or three hours, skim off any grease, and stir in a little flour mixed with milk. To make a stew of cold meat, first make the gravy of stock, add a fried sliced onion, pepper and salt, and a tea-spoon catsup; let it boil, and set aside to cool; when nearly cold, put in thinlycut slices of cold meat, and a few slices cold potatoes, and let heat gradually until it comes to the boiling point; serve with bread cut in dice and fried.
This is a page from the book's Fragments chapter, so several short methods run together: curd cheese, potatoes Lyonnaise, a stuffed flank steak, gravy, potato starch and stews. The first of them is the one that cannot be reproduced today.
- Why the curd cheese failsClabber is raw milk left to sour and set on its own wild bacteria. Modern raw milk carries a real risk of Salmonella, Listeria, shiga-toxin E. coli and Campylobacter, and nothing in this method reaches a temperature that would control them — the curd is warmed only to what a finger can bear, roughly 100–110F, then hung in a bag for three or four hours or overnight and eaten with raw cream. Pasteurized milk also will not clabber cleanly; it tends to spoil rather than set. Use a current cottage cheese recipe built on cultured pasteurized milk instead.
- The oven instruction is not a temperature"Set on the stove hearth or in the oven after cooking a meal, leaving the door open" describes coasting residual heat from a wood range, somewhere under body heat to lukewarm. There is no modern oven setting that corresponds to it; even the lowest setting on a domestic oven is considerably too hot.
- Potatoes Lyonnaise: keep the pan quietThe whole point of "fried white" is that the potatoes never colour. Use a barely warm, well-buttered pan over low heat, shake rather than stir, and pull them off as soon as they are hot through. Cold boiled potatoes are essential — freshly boiled ones break up.
- Fry in fat, not butterThe parenthetical advice still holds: butter's milk solids scorch well below frying temperature. For actually browned potatoes use lard, beef drippings or a neutral oil at 350–375F.
- Stuffed beefsteakFlank steak pounded thin, spread with bread stuffing, rolled and tied is a braciole in all but name. If you take the second route and roast it straight, 325–350F for about an hour and a half suits a rolled flank; the salt pork on top is doing the work of barding a lean cut. "Cover with a dripping-pan" means invert a second pan over it as a lid.
- Browned flourToasting a quart of flour to light brown and bottling it is a working pantry shortcut, and the reason given is sound — browned flour needs almost no cooking. It also loses some thickening power, so allow somewhat more of it than you would raw flour for the same body. Store it airtight; it keeps for months but will pick up staleness.
- Gravy must boilThe insistence on boiling rather than simmering is about the raw flour. A flour-thickened gravy needs two or three minutes at a full boil, stirred, or it tastes pasty. Fat skimmed first, as the text says.
- Potato flour is potato starchThis is the old way of making what is now sold in any supermarket as potato starch. The yield is small — about an ounce or two of dry starch per pound of potatoes — and the repeated water changes wash out the solubles, including the phenolics responsible for the greying the text warns about. Buying it is the sensible choice; the "potato jelly" is simply the starch gelatinized with boiling water.
- StewsTwo or three hours of gentle simmering for chuck or round is still right. The cold-meat stew depends on adding the sliced cooked meat to nearly cold gravy and bringing it up slowly, which keeps it from shredding; heat it to a boil before serving, since it has been standing.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) carries "Fragments" material — short paragraphs of leftovers management, pantry economy and cook's opinion, set in the run-on style of a woman talking while she works. Curd cheese belongs squarely to that thrift: on a farm with a cow, milk soured whether anyone wanted it to or not, and clabber turned an unavoidable surplus into supper. The name cottage cheese is generally traced to exactly this domestic, non-dairy-scale manufacture, the cheese made in the cottage rather than the cheese house, and the book's three dressings — salt and pepper with cream, sugar and nutmeg, or molded into salted balls — show it moving between savoury side dish and dessert without much ceremony. The neighbouring paragraph on potatoes Lyonnaise (Lyon, and its onions) is the same book in a different mood, gently mocking hotel menu French while conceding that the dish is genuinely good.