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Cottage Cheese
Set a gallon or more of thick sour milk in warm water, or in a warm place until it reaches a temperature of 180° F. Let stand at this temperature for an hour or more, until the curd separates from the whey and seems firm. Turn gently into a piece of cheesecloth; hang up to drain for several hours; chop and mix salt and cream through the mass, working the mixture well with the hands.
A straightforward acid-set fresh cheese, but it depends on milk that sours cleanly — something modern pasteurized, homogenized milk will not reliably do.
- Start with cultured milk, not spoiled milkThe recipe's 'thick sour milk' almost certainly means raw milk left to clabber, where lactic bacteria dominate and set a sweet, firm curd. Pasteurized milk left on the counter is unlikely to clabber cleanly and often just spoils; to reproduce this reliably, sour the milk deliberately with cultured buttermilk or a mesophilic starter.
- The 180°F hold is the hingeEverything depends on holding the temperature, not reaching it. A water bath — the pot set inside a larger pan of hot water — gives the gentle, even heat the recipe wants. Direct heat scorches the bottom and toughens the curd before the whey ever releases.
- Do not overshootMuch above 185-190 F the curd tends to contract and turn squeaky and rubbery. Use a thermometer; the recipe's own 180 F assumes one, even where it allows the looser 'warm place' as the heat source.
- Turn gently means turn gentlyStirring or pouring roughly at this stage shatters the curd into fines that wash straight through the cloth. Ladle it in.
- Draining time"Several hours" gives a dry, crumbly curd suited to being dressed with cream afterward. One to two hours is enough for a moister cheese; taste and stop when the texture suits you.
- Salt and creamNo quantities are given. Roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt and a quarter to a half cup of cream per pound of drained curd is the usual range; work it in by hand as directed, since a spoon compacts the curd.
- YieldA gallon of whole milk gives roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of drained curd, depending on how long it hangs. The whey is worth keeping for baking.
- KeepingThis is an unripened fresh cheese with no preservative beyond salt. Refrigerate and use within about five days.
Cottage cheese is generally said to have earned its name honestly: it was, by the traditional account, the cheese a household could make without a press, a cave, or rennet, using nothing but the milk that had gone sour since yesterday and a square of cloth. Its appearance here under Meat Substitutes places the book squarely in its moment ators promoted cottage cheese hard in the 1910s as a cheap protein that spared beef and pork for other uses. The economy is real: skim milk left over from butter-making was otherwise fed to pigs, and turning it into a pound and a half of protein cost only heat and patience. What the instruction assumes, and what has quietly disappeared, is a supply of raw milk that would sour predictably into clabber rather than simply spoil.