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Cheese, Bath Cream
Put a gallon of new milk and two quarts of cold spring water into the cheese-tub, with sufficient rennet to turn it. More will be required than if milk alone were used. When the curd comes let the whey drip from it, then pour a little water over it and let it drip again. Fill a vat with the curd, place a weight upon it, and apply dry cloths for a day or two. Turn it out on a plate, cover it with another plate, and turn occasionally. It will be ready for use in a fort-night. Neither salt nor colouring are required.
This is a raw-milk soft cheese with no salt, no measured temperature and no measured rennet, ripened on a plate for two weeks. It cannot be reproduced safely as written, and the points below explain why rather than how.
- "New milk" means raw milkNew milk is milk straight from the animal, unheated and unpasteurised. The recipe specifies no heating at any stage: coagulation, draining and a fortnight of ripening all proceed without it, so nothing in the method would reduce Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella or Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli.
- Two weeks is far short of the safe ageing windowTwo weeks is far short of the ageing window some regulators require -- In the United States and some other jurisdictions, raw-milk cheese must be aged at least 60 days before sale; in the EU raw-milk cheese is legal without that requirement. Either way, a high-moisture cream cheese eaten at fourteen days falls into the category regulators treat as highest risk.
- No salt is not a stylistic choiceThe recipe ends "neither salt nor colouring are required." Salt is not seasoning here; it lowers water activity and slows pathogen growth in a young soft cheese. Omitting it removes one of the few hurdles the method had.
- Added spring water compounds the problemTwo quarts of untreated cold water go into a gallon of raw milk. That is a second unheated, untested ingredient added to the vessel, and it further dilutes the acid and solids that would otherwise offer some protection.
- "Sufficient rennet to turn it" is unquantifiedRennet strength varied enormously between farm rennet, commercial extract and later microbial coagulants, so no dose can be inferred from this line. With no temperature given either, there is no way to know whether the curd set through clean acidification or simply sat warm.
- Ripening on an open plateTurning the cheese between two plates gives no control of temperature or humidity and no barrier to contamination. A modern cheesemaker would call this an uncontrolled ripening environment.
- If you want to make Bath cheeseUse a current recipe built on pasteurised milk, a measured culture and rennet dose, stated setting and draining temperatures, and salt by weight.
Bath cheese belongs to a small family of soft, quick-ripening English cream cheeses — Bath, York, Slipcote — that were sold fresh and local rather than aged and shipped, and that appear in Victorian cookery dictionaries as farmhouse or dairy-house preparations rather than commercial ones. Such dictionaries arrange their cheese entries alphabetically as reference material, which is why this one arrives with no yield, no temperature and no serving note: the compilers assumed a reader with a cheese-tub, a vat and a cool larder already in use. The appeal of these light, rich-tasting soft cheeses was delicacy rather than keeping quality, and the note that no colouring is needed is a quiet reminder that annatto was commonly added to firmer English cheeses of the period to give them a uniform golden face.