Home › Miscellaneous › Uncooked Curd, or French Cottage Cheese
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 custard-like consistency, and takes the shape of a 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.
This is a description of French fromage blanc drained in a faisselle, and the method depends entirely on a kind of milk that is no longer what it was. The points below explain the problem and the vocabulary.
- Why it fails nowThe whole method rests on raw milk souring on its own into clean, edible clabber. Nothing in the process is ever heated, so there is no step that kills pathogens; uncontrolled ambient souring of raw milk can carry Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli O157:H7, and the curd is then eaten cold and uncooked. Use a current recipe for fresh cheese made with pasteurised milk and a measured culture.
- Pasteurised milk will not do thisEven setting safety aside, the instruction does not transfer. Pasteurised milk lacks the native lactic bacteria that turned farmhouse milk to clabber, so left out it spoils rather than sets, with proteolytic bacteria producing bitterness and off smells instead of a clean acid curd.
- Earthen molds with holesThese are faisselles — perforated cups, still sold in France, that shape the curd as they drain. The book's suggested fine sieve is the same idea; a cheesecloth-lined mold is the usual modern equivalent.
- "Custard-like consistency"The finished curd here is not the dry, crumbly cottage cheese of an American dairy but something closer to a set yoghurt or thick fromage blanc, soft enough to hold the ridges of the mold and spoonable.
- The dessert as servedSweet cream and sugar poured over the unmolded curd, with currants or strawberries, is the classic French service — the same combination that survives as coeur à la crème. That part of the idea is sound; only the cheesemaking is not.
Uncooked fresh curd is one of the oldest dairy foods in Europe and needs no equipment beyond a perforated pot: milk sours, the casein sets, the whey runs out through the holes. In France it appears under a shelf of regional names — caillebotte, jonchee, fromage blanc a la faisselle — and was a farmhouse dessert long before it was a shop item, eaten with cream and sugar or with the summer fruit ripening at the same moment the milk was souring fastest. A cheese of this kind required no rennet and no fuel, which is part of its long domestic appeal. The heart-shaped perforated mold used for coeur a la creme works on the same principle as the molds described here.