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Some Kitchen Kinks: French
Uncooked Curd, or French Cottage Cheese.
The French make cheese from sour milk without heating it. They pour the milk into earthen molds which have holes in the bottom. A very fine sieve may be used instead of the molds. The whey drips out and the curd assumes a custardlike consistency and takes the shape of the mold. When sufficiently stiff, the cheese is chilled, and is eaten with sweet cream and sugar. It is a staple dessert in many French families, especially in hot weather, and is delicious served with acid fruit, such as currants, or with strawberries.
Junket.
If cottage cheese is made from sweet milk and rennet and served without breaking and separating the curd and whey, the dish is called junket. It is customary to season it a little, as with grated nutmeg or with cinnamon and sugar.
This is a description of fromage blanc drained in a faisselle, and of junket, both of which depend on milk that no longer exists in the form the author assumed.
- Why the method fails nowThe whole technique rests on raw milk souring at room temperature, where its native lactic bacteria acidify it fast enough to set a clean curd. Nothing is ever heated, so nothing is ever brought to a temperature that would kill Listeria, Salmonella, Campylobacter or E. coli O157:H7. Souring may crowd out some competitors, but acidification alone is not reliable against these organisms, and hours at room temperature give any that are present time to multiply.
- Pasteurised milk does not clabberPasteurised milk clabbers poorly -- Pasteurisation greatly reduces the milk's native lactic flora along with pathogens, and ultra-pasteurised milk more so. Left out, such milk generally does not set into a clean curd; it is colonised by whatever happens to reach it and tends to spoil. Following these directions with supermarket milk is far more likely to give an off-smelling mess than cheese.
- Uncontrolled, unmeasured acidificationThere is no starter culture, no measured temperature, no target acidity and no time given. Safe fresh-cheese making today depends on a known culture dropping the pH quickly and predictably; "sour milk" as a specification gives the cook no way to know whether the batch went right.
- The junket variantJunket is sweet milk set with rennet, and as described here there is no heating step at all. Rennet coagulates but does not preserve, so an unheated rennet custard left to firm up is simply raw milk held at a hospitable temperature.
- Molds and drainingThe perforated earthen molds are faisselles, still sold for draining fresh cheese, and the sieve substitution the author suggests is sound as far as drainage goes. The vessel is not the problem; the milk is.
- If you want the dishFromage blanc served with cream, sugar and currants or strawberries is worth eating, and commercial fromage blanc and quark are widely available. Use a current recipe with a measured culture and pasteurised milk, or buy the cheese.
What the author calls uncooked curd belongs to the family of fresh drained cheeses sold in France as fromage blanc, fromage \in in firmer form, caillebotte. Caillebotte derives from cailler, to curdle; it is fromage \a la faisselle that takes its name from the perforated earthenware mold. Before refrigeration, milk that had begun to turn was raw material rather than waste, and a household with a cow had sour milk daily; draining it into a sweet, spoonable curd made a cheap hot-weather dessert, and American cookery of the period more often directed sour milk into baking with saleratus. Junket, the sweet-milk version set with rennet, was a nursery and invalid dish in English-speaking households through the nineteenth century and later became a branded product in the United States, sold as tablets. Household guides of this period regularly presented such dishes as economical and wholesome; the ready availability of raw milk that made them practical is also the reason they read as reckless now.