Home › Pickles-Relishes › Cottage Cheese & Carrot Salad
Cottage Cheese & Carrot Salad
½ pint cottage cheese 2 small carrots grated Mix together and serve on lettuce leaf with mayonnaise dressing. Laura Grummitt.
A two-ingredient salad from the era when "salad" often meant something arranged on a leaf of lettuce rather than tossed. The only real difficulty is the garbled quantity in the first line.
- "12 pint"Almost certainly a typesetting loss of the fraction: 1/2 pint of cottage cheese, which is one cup, or about 8 ounces. A full 12 pints would be six quarts, which no home cook was pairing with two carrots.
- Cottage cheese then and nowCottage cheese was often made at home from clabbered milk, drained dry and crumbly rather than swimming in cream dressing, though commercially made cheese was also on sale. Small-curd dry-curd cheese comes closest; if you use standard creamed cottage cheese, drain it in a sieve for a few minutes so the carrot does not slide off the lettuce.
- The carrotsTwo small carrots grated fine gives roughly half a cup, enough for colour and sweetness without turning the mixture wet. Grate on the fine side of a box grater and mix just before serving, or the carrot bleeds orange into the curd.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn a church-cookbook context this could mean either jarred mayonnaise, commercially available from the 1910s onward, or the cooked flour-and-egg "boiled dressing" still made at home. A thinned mayonnaise with a spoonful of lemon juice suits the salad better than a stiff spoonful sitting on top.
- ServingOne cup of cheese plus the carrot makes two generous or four small portions, mounded on a cup-shaped leaf of iceberg or butterhead. Salt and pepper are unstated but assumed; the dish is flat without them.
- Filed under pickles and relishesThe recipe appears in that section of the book, though what that implies about how it was served is not clear from the recipe itself.
Cottage cheese salads like this one belong to the long American vogue, roughly 1900 through the 1950s, for cool arranged salads served on a single lettuce leaf, a form promoted heavily by domestic science writers and by the manufacturers of bottled mayonnaise. Cottage cheese itself was a thrift food before it was a diet food: it used up milk that had soured past drinking, and farm and small-town households made it constantly. Recipes of this kind, signed with a contributor's name, are the backbone of church and ladies'-aid cookbooks, which were sold to raise money and which recorded what people actually put on the table rather than what a professional cook thought they should.