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Cottage Cheese
When the tea-kettle boils, pour the water into a pan of "loppered" milk. It will curd at once. Stir it and turn it into a colander, pour a little cold water over it, salt it and break it up. A better way is to put equal parts of buttermilk and thick milk in a kettle, over the fire, heat it almost boiling hot, pour into a linen bag and let it drain till next day. Then take it out, salt it, put in a little cream or butter, as it may be thick or not, and make it up into balls the size of an orange.
The vocabulary here is the vocabulary of a dairy that was worked every day, and the method depends on a raw-milk kitchen that no longer exists. The terms are worth knowing even though the procedure is not one to follow.
- "Loppered" milkLoppered (elsewhere clabbered, or lobbered) means raw milk left to sour and thicken on its own until it sets in a soft curd. It is not yogurt and not soured store milk; it is the spontaneous work of whatever bacteria the milk arrived with.
- Why this is the unsafe stepHolding raw milk at room temperature for a day or more is exactly the condition in which Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria multiply alongside the souring lactic bacteria. In the first method the milk is only warmed by kettle water poured into a cold pan, so nothing reaches a pasteurizing temperature, and in the second the curd is then hung at room temperature until the next day. Souring does not sterilize.
- Modern milk will not behave this wayPasteurized, homogenized milk left out does not lopper; it spoils, going bitter and separating with an off smell. The recipe cannot simply be repeated with supermarket milk. If you want fresh cheese, use a current recipe with a measured culture or acid and a stated temperature.
- "Thick milk"Thick milk here appears to mean the same soured, set raw milk, as distinct from sweet (fresh) milk. Buttermilk in this period was normally the genuinely sour liquid drained from the butter churn, thinner and more acidic than the cultured buttermilk sold now.
- The linen bagA square of closely woven linen or several layers of cheesecloth, tied at the corners and hung over a bowl. Butter muslin is the modern equivalent; ordinary loose-weave cheesecloth lets fine curd through.
- Yield and finishBalls "the size of an orange" suggest a table cheese meant to be sliced or spread rather than the loose wet curd sold as cottage cheese today. The recipe gives no quantity; yields vary with the milk and how far the curd is drained, but a gallon gives on the order of a pound or two.
Fresh acid-set curd of this kind is probably the oldest form of cheese: the byproduct of a household that had more milk than it could drink and no cellar cold enough to keep it. Books of this period give it several names -- pot cheese, smearcase, Dutch cheese, clabber cheese -- and such directions often sit near those for butter and buttermilk, since all three came out of the same dairy work. The word "loppered" is a good marker of the book's audience: it belongs to an older English and Scots dairy vocabulary and needed no gloss for a reader who owned a cow. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, whose title page advertises contributions from some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and entries like this one, with its casual "a better way," read like one woman correcting another across a fence.