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POTATO CHEESE (a Saxon recipe)
Potato cheese is made thus in Saxony. Boil potatoes of the large white kind, and when cool peel them, and reduce them to a pulp by grating or pounding in a mortar. To every seven pounds of this pulp, add a pint of sour milk, and salt to taste. Knead the whole together, cover it up, and let it remain three or four days; at the end of which time, knead it again, form it into cheeses, and place the cheeses in small baskets to drain. Dry them in the shade, arranged in layers in pots. Potato cheeses are always much improved by keeping.
This is a peasant preservation method recorded rather than tested, and it sits outside anything a modern kitchen can control. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a way round them.
- Cooked potato is the problem ingredientBoiled potato is low-acid, moist and starchy, and it is one of the classic growth substrates for Clostridium botulinum. Holding seven pounds of it in a covered mass at room temperature for three or four days is precisely the condition the organism needs, and the toxin it produces is neither visible nor detectable by smell.
- A pint of sour milk cannot acidify seven pounds of pulpA pint of sour milk cannot reliably acidify seven pounds of pulp -- Cheese is kept safe by a combination of acidification, salt and moisture loss, with fresh lactic curds falling to around pH 4.6. Here the ratio is roughly one part liquid to six or seven parts potato by weight, and the souring is whatever wild bacteria happened to be in the milk. The mixture cannot be relied on to reach a safe pH.
- "Sour milk" is not today's milkIn the nineteenth century this meant raw milk that had clabbered under its own lactic bacteria into a thick, tart curd. Pasteurised milk left out does not clabber; it spoils, because the lactic organisms that once dominated have been removed and the survivors are putrefactive.
- Drying in the shade is not a preservation stepAir-drying a dense, high-moisture cheese in ambient conditions removes surface water only. The interior stays wet and anaerobic, and packing the cheeses in layers in pots seals that interior off from air entirely.
- No salt figure is given"Salt to taste" is fine for a dish eaten the same day and meaningless in a preserve. Curing depends on a measured percentage by weight of the whole mass; a seasoning quantity contributes nothing to safety.
- "Improved by keeping" describes the risk, not a virtueThe extended ripening the recipe recommends is the period during which any contamination present has the longest opportunity to multiply. If you want a fermented potato or dairy preparation, work from a current recipe with stated pH targets, salt percentages and holding temperatures.
Potato cheese belongs to a small family of European economy foods from the period after the potato became a staple crop, when households stretched scarce dairy by bulking curd with cooked, mashed potato. Versions circulate in agricultural and domestic literature through the nineteenth century, sometimes as a genuine cottage product, more often as a curiosity copied from one compiler to the next. It is offered as information about how other people eat rather than as a cheese recipe proper. The underlying idea, that a starchy filler can carry a dairy ferment, survives in various modern potato-and-curd dishes; what the old recipe lacks is any of the measurement that made the practice work for those who grew up with it.