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Cheese, Cream
Take some thick cream and tie it in a wet cloth. Stir a tea-spoonful of salt into every pint of cream. Hang it in a cool airy place for six or seven days, then turn it into a clean cloth, which must be put into a mould, and under a weight for about twenty-four hours longer, when it will be fit for use. It should be turned twice a day. Probable cost, cream, 1s. 6d. per pint.
This is a nineteenth-century drained cream cheese, made by hanging raw cream in cloth for the better part of a week at room conditions. The method depends on a dairy chain that no longer exists, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen.
- No heat step, no starter, no measured acidThe cream is never pasteurised, never inoculated with a known culture, and never acidified to a target pH. Whatever ripens it is whatever happens to be present in the cream and the cloth. Modern soft-cheese practice controls all three of those variables precisely because the margin for error in a high-moisture, low-acid cheese is very small.
- Six or seven days at ambient temperatureA "cool airy place" in a Victorian larder might be 50-55F; a modern kitchen or utility room is 65-72F. Held for a week at those warmer temperatures, cream is a growth medium for Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, none of which announce themselves by smell or taste.
- The salt does not preserve itA teaspoonful to the pint is roughly 1 percent by weight, and much of it drains away in the whey. That is a seasoning level, not a preservative level. Hard cheeses and cured meats rely on far higher salt concentrations working together with low water activity, which a soft fresh cream cheese never reaches.
- Weighting in cloth for a further dayThe pressing stage adds another twenty-four hours at room temperature to an already extended hold, and the cloth itself is an uncontrolled surface. There is no point in the process at which the cheese is brought to a temperature that would kill pathogens.
- If you want the resultBuy a fresh cream cheese made from pasteurised cream, or follow a current recipe from a dairy or cheesemaking source that specifies a culture, a temperature and a target acidity.
- Reading the costing"1s. 6d." is one shilling and sixpence, eighteen old pence, for an imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces rather than the American 16. Cassell's gave a probable cost for most of its recipes.
English cream cheese of this era was not the pressed, cultured product sold under that name today but simply cream separated from its whey by draining, salted and lightly pressed — closer to a very rich curd than to a cheese in the rennet-and-ripening sense. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the last decades of the nineteenth century for households with a cook and a cool larder, presumably assumed a supply of thick raw cream and a room that stayed genuinely cold, both of which shaped how ambitious such an unheated method could reasonably be. The eighteenpence per pint quoted here marks cream as an expensive ingredient in a book that priced everything. The wider context is a dairy trade before compulsory pasteurisation, when milk-borne tuberculosis and typhoid were routine facts of urban life.