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Cottage Cheese
Place a panful of clabbered milk over a pan of hot water. Let it heat slowly till the curd separates; do not allow to boil or it will be tough. Strain through a cloth bag and press out all the whey; stir in a little butter and salt, and as much thick sweet cream as possible and still have it retain its form when turned from a mold or rolled into balls. Work it well with a spoon until it becomes fine-grained.-Anne Warner.
This is a farm-dairy method that depends on raw milk souring cleanly in a cool larder, a set of conditions no modern kitchen reproduces. The terms are worth understanding, but the process is not one to follow.
- Why it fails todayThe recipe begins with milk already clabbered, soured by its own bacteria rather than a controlled culture, and never heats it past the point where curd separates from whey. Any pathogens present at the start of that souring -- Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria -- have hours in which to multiply and are never killed. Use a current cultured-milk cheese recipe instead.
- ClabberClabbered milk is raw whole milk that has soured and set to a soft junket by the action of its own native lactic bacteria, with no added culture. Ordinary pasteurized milk will not reliably do this: with its lactic flora largely gone it tends to spoil rather than set, and clabbering it is not a matter of simply leaving it out.
- "A panful ... over a pan of hot water"This is an improvised double boiler, and the point of it is indirect, gentle heat. The instruction not to boil is sound as far as it goes -- too much heat contracts the casein and gives a squeaky, rubbery curd -- but a temperature low enough to keep the curd tender is also too low to make the milk safe.
- Straining and pressingA "cloth bag" is butter muslin or several layers of cheesecloth; whey was often put to use rather than thrown away, going to pigs or into bread and baking. Pressing hard gives the dry, crumbly pot cheese the recipe then rebuilds with fat.
- Thick sweet cream"Sweet" means unsoured, as opposed to the clabbered milk; "thick" means the risen cream from unhomogenised milk, richer than modern table cream. The quantity is deliberately left to judgment -- enough to enrich the curd but not so much that a molded shape slumps.
- "Fine-grained"Working the curd with a spoon breaks the coarse grains and emulsifies the butter and cream through them, producing the smooth, dense texture of a molded cheese rather than the loose lumps of supermarket cottage cheese. This is closer to what would now be sold as farmer cheese or pot cheese.
Cottage cheese is the plainest thing a dairy can make: the curd that forms when milk is simply let alone. It carried a different name in nearly every American kitchen -- Dutch cheese in New York and New England, pot cheese, smearcase or schmierkase in Pennsylvania German households, from the German Schmierkase, spreading cheese -- and the modern label is usually traced, though without firm documentation, to the idea of cheese made in a cottage rather than a creamery, without press, rennet or ripening room. That the method is credited to a named contributor reflects how such household compilations were assembled: readers sent in the methods they used at home, at a time when many still had access to raw milk in quantity and a cool place to set it. Recipes of this kind became rarer in household manuals as milk moved from the farm to the pasteurizing plant, and the commercial curd, made with a measured starter culture on a controlled schedule, took its place on the table.