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Delicious Cottage Cheese
This may be used in sandwiches, canapés, or for balls served with salad. Take four quarts of whole or skimmed milk, set it in a warm place until it sours enough to be of the consistency of baked custard. Now turn the soured milk into a cheesecloth bag and let the whey drip out until the curds are about as stiff as a soft cream cheese. It usually takes from six to eight hours. If the curd gets too dry the cheese will not be good. Turn the cheese out of the bag into a bowl and beat with a fork, adding the desired amount of salt.
If skimmed milk has been used the addition of a little cream makes the cheese better.
This is clabbered cheese: milk left to sour on its own, drained, salted, eaten cold. It was ordinary practice in a house that took delivery of fresh raw milk, and it does not translate to a modern refrigerator and a carton from the supermarket.
- The milk is never heatedNothing in this method brings the milk above room temperature at any stage, and the finished cheese is eaten raw. Whatever is present in the milk at the start is still present, and after six to eight hours in a warm place a good deal more of it.
- Raw milk is the assumptionSpontaneous clabbering depends on the native lactic bacteria in unpasteurised milk. Those same conditions favour Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, and E. coli O157:H7, none of which announce themselves by smell or taste, and none of which are excluded by the souring.
- Pasteurised milk does not clabberModern milk is unlikely to clabber the same way. Pasteurisation removes most of the native lactic flora, so pasteurised milk left in a warm place tends to spoil rather than set into a clean curd -- going bitter or putrid, colonised by whatever airborne or handling organisms arrive first -- and ultra-pasteurised milk will not set at all. The recipe's own test, "the consistency of baked custard," may never be reached.
- No culture, no acid targetContemporary fresh-cheese making uses a measured starter culture and works to a target pH, usually around 4.6, the point at which casein coagulates; rapid acidification also limits the growth of many organisms, though acid alone is not a kill step. This method has neither a culture nor a measurable target, and "until it sours enough" is not a control.
- "A warm place" is the danger zoneAn unspecified warm spot in a kitchen sits squarely in the 40-140F range where bacteria multiply fastest, and the recipe holds the milk there until it sours, then drains it for a further six to eight hours at the same temperature.
- The drip bagStraining for hours at room temperature in cheesecloth adds a long window of open exposure, with the curd handled and beaten by hand at the end. There is no kill step anywhere after it.
- If you want the resultFresh cottage cheese and fromage blanc made with pasteurised milk and a purchased mesophilic culture are widely documented; use a current recipe with stated temperatures and a starter.
Cheese of this kind went by many names before it was a supermarket product: clabber cheese, Dutch cheese, pot cheese, smearcase (from the German Schmierk yply curds. It was the natural end of surplus milk in a household without much refrigeration, and skim milk left after the cream was taken for butter was one common raw material, which may be why the recipe suggests beating a little cream back in. That the author offers it for sandwiches, canap he light-luchilled savoury spread. Commercial cottage cheese made with controlled cultures and pasteurised milk was available from creameries by the early twentieth century.