Home › The Principles of Cookery › POTATO CHEESE (other ways)
POTATO CHEESE (other ways)
A better potato cheese than that produced by following the preceding recipe may be made with four pounds of potato paste, and two pounds of milk and rennet; one still better by mixing three pounds of potato paste with three pounds of milk and rennet; and one better still by adding three pounds of milk and rennet to two pounds of potato paste. But the most delicate of potato cheese is prepared in the following manner. Mix one part of potato paste with three parts of milk and rennet salted. Knead in the way prescribed in the foregoing recipe, and leave the mixture in the moulds for three or four days, when at the bottom of each mould there will be found a layer of cheese about three-quarters of an inch thick. On the surface of this spread with a spoon a piece of fresh butter a little larger than a plover's egg, and over this strew a mixture of pounded mace and caraway-seeds. On this now place another similar cheese, with the same ingredients spread over its surface. Continue adding cheese after cheese until the basket is full. After a time, which varies according to the state of the weather, all these layers will be found adhering together and forming one large cheese. Take this out, and place it on a board to dry gradually. This cheese will keep for many years.
This is a cheese-curing procedure rather than a dish, and it is the one category of old dairy recipe that cannot be reconstructed safely from the page. The notes below explain what the instructions leave out and why that matters.
- Raw milk, no heat step anywhere"Milk and rennet" here means milk set with rennet at farm temperature and never heated to any pasteurising point. Raw-milk curd carries a real risk of Listeria monocytogenes, Shiga-toxin E. coli and Salmonella, and nothing in this method — not the salting, not the drying — is specified in a way that would control them.
- The potato paste is the bigger problemCooked, mashed potato is low in acid, high in moisture and rich in nutrients: a near-ideal growth medium. The proportions given here run from two parts potato to one of curd down to one part potato to three of curd, and diluting a curd that far raises the pH and water activity of the whole mass, which undermines the acidity that makes real cheese self-preserving. Bacillus cereus and Clostridium botulinum spores survive boiling potato, and the buttered, packed layers may create the sort of airless pockets they favour.
- No measured salt, no pH, no temperatureThe salt is given only as "salted", the ripening temperature not at all, and the ripening time is left to "the state of the weather". Safe curing depends on a known salt percentage and a known acidification curve; without either, this is uncontrolled fermentation held for days at ambient warmth.
- "Will keep for many years"A hard, low-moisture, properly acidified cheese can age for years. A starch-extended, high-moisture one cannot, and the claim should be read as period optimism rather than evidence. If you want to make cheese, use a current recipe with stated milk treatment, culture, salt weight and pH targets.
- It depends on a recipe not on this pageThe kneading, the moulds and the making of the potato paste itself are all deferred to "the foregoing recipe", so even as a historical document this entry is incomplete on its own.
- Archaic terms, for readingA plover's egg is small — on the order of 25 g, so the butter is roughly a tablespoon per layer. The "basket" appears to be the same vessel as the "mould": a perforated form that lets whey drain. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and lighter than the seed itself.
Potato cheese belongs to a cluster of early nineteenth-century economy recipes that circulated through German and French household and agricultural writing and from there into English compilations. The logic was arithmetic: milk was dear and potatoes were cheap, so a farm dairy could stretch a limited curd by working boiled, sieved potato into it — the same impulse that produced potato bread and potato flour puddings in the decades after the potato became a staple crop in northern Europe. What is striking about this particular entry is that it grades its own results, admitting that the more potato you use the worse the cheese, until at one part potato to three parts curd it becomes "the most delicate" — which is another way of saying that the dish improves the closer it comes to being ordinary cheese.