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Curds and Cream
Curd is usually served in a dish with cream, sweetened and flavoured, poured round it; it should be drained from the whey and flavoured with a little light wine. Time, a quarter of an hour to separate the curd. Sufficient, a quart of milk curdled and a pint of cream for a moderate-sized dish. Probable cost, 2s.
This is a serving note as much as a recipe: the book assumes you already know how to set milk with rennet and concerns itself with what happens next. A few gaps need filling before it works in a modern kitchen.
- The missing ingredientNo curdling agent is named because the Victorian cook took rennet for granted. Liquid animal rennet or vegetarian rennet, used at the strength on the bottle, is what produces a soft junket-style curd in about fifteen minutes; acid curdling with lemon juice or vinegar gives a grainier, sharper curd that behaves quite differently under cream.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, roughly 1.1 litres or just under 5 US cups; the pint of cream is 20 fl oz, about 2.4 US cups. US measures are about a sixth smaller in each case, so scaling by them leaves you short of milk and cream in the same proportion.
- Milk that will setWhole pasteurised milk sets well. Ultra-pasteurised or UHT milk often will not coagulate properly with rennet, and skimmed milk gives a weak, watery curd. Warm to about 100F before adding rennet, then leave it absolutely still — stirring a setting curd breaks it and the whey runs out.
- DrainingLadle the set curd into a muslin-lined sieve rather than tipping it, and drain only until it stops dripping freely. Over-drained curd turns to a dry crumb and the point of the dish is a soft, barely-held mass under cream.
- "A little light wine"The recipe attaches the wine to the curd itself, though the cream is separately to be "sweetened and flavoured"; either way a spoonful or two is meant, not a wineglass poured over. A dry or lightly sweet white fits the description "light wine"; sherry or a fortified dessert wine is a heavier substitution, and vanilla and lemon zest will do if you would rather leave alcohol out.
- The creamPour it round the curd, not over it, and sweeten it before it goes into the dish; sugar scattered on top will sit in gritty pockets. Single or light cream may be closer to what the book meant by "cream" than modern heavy cream, which will sit as a stiff collar rather than a pool, though Victorian cream varied considerably in richness.
- Yield and timingA quart of milk makes what the book calls a "moderate-sized dish" -- perhaps four to six as a light dessert. Assemble it shortly before serving, as curd left standing under cream continues to weep whey.
- The cost line"Probable cost, 2s." is two shillings, a housekeeping figure from a period when the book expected readers to price a dish before deciding on it. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Curds and cream, or curds and whey, belongs to the long English tradition of fresh unripened milk dishes — junket, possets, syllabubs — made in dairy households where a surplus of milk had to be used the same day. The rennet that sets it was originally an extract of calf stomach lining, sold to cooks in bottles by the nineteenth century. Curd was a starting point for a whole family of dishes: cheesecakes, curd tarts and curd fritters all begin with the same drained mass, and a cook who could set and drain curd reliably could make any of them. The instruction to flavour with a little light wine reflects a taste that runs right back through eighteenth-century dairy cookery, where sack, sherry and white wine were the standard perfumes for anything made of milk and sugar.