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Laboratory Exercises (Butter C cream t salt Put)
Butter. 1 C. cream t. salt 1. Put cream into a pint Mason jar and screw cover down tightly. 2. Shake the jar until lumps of fat appear. 3. Scald a wooden spoon or butter paddle, then chill it. 4. Gather the particles of butter into a ball and work with wooden spoon under cold water to wash out the sour buttermilk. 5. Put into bowl and press out the water. 6. Work the salt into the butter and put in a covered dish in a cool place.
Cottage Cheese No. 1. 1 qt. sour milk 1 T. butter t. salt cream to moisten 1. Remove the cream and put aside to use in moistening the cheese. 2. Heat the milk in double boiler. Let the water in the lower part of the boiler just simmer. If milk gets too hot the curd will be tough and stringy. 3. When the curd separates from the whey, strain through a cheese cloth. Let the whey drip out; do not squeeze dry. If the milk is rather sour, pour cold water through the curd and let it drain out. 4. Add the salt, butter and cream to the curd and stir until smooth.
Note. Cottage cheese may be served plain or may have carraway seed or chopped chives, parsley, olives or pimentoes mixed with it. It may be served on a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of mayonnaise or boiled dressing as a salad or it may be used as a filling for sandwiches. Cottage Cheese No. 2. 1 qt. sweet milk 1 rennet tablet or 1 T. pepsin cream to moisten 1 T. butter t. salt If you do not like the slightly sour taste of cottage cheese No. 1 or have no sour milk on hand, use the foregoing recipe, No. 2. 1. Heat sweet milk in double boiler to 100° F. or to body temperature. 2. Dissolve the rennet tablet in a little cool milk and stir into the warm milk.
MILK 3. Let stand until the curd has set, then stir with a spoon to break up the curds. 4. Strain through cheese cloth and proceed as for Cottage Cheese No. 1.
Rennet Dessert. 3 C. milk 3 T. sugar 1 t. vanilla of one rennet tablet 1. Heat milk in double boiler until luke warm or the same as body temperature. (If too warm the rennet will not act.) 2. Dissolve rennet tablet in 1 T. luke warm water. Add this with sugar and vanilla to the milk. 3. Stir well and pour into molds or into cups in which it is to be served and let stand in a warm room to stiffen. When firm set in the ice box to chill. (Do not shake nor stir the custard after it has been put into the moulds or the curds and whey will separate.) 4. Serve plain or with chocolate sauce.
Chocolate Sauce. 2 T. cocoa + C. sugar 1/2 T. cornstarch C. water 1. Mix cocoa, sugar and cornstarch together. 2. Add water and boil two minutes, stirring constantly. 3. Pour carefully over the custard. (Rennet custard is very tender and breaks easily.)
A milk unit from a domestic-science laboratory course: butter from cream, two cottage cheeses, and a rennet dessert with a cocoa sauce. All four still work, but the dairy on a modern shelf behaves differently from the dairy these students were handed.
- Buy the right creamOrdinary pasteurized heavy or whipping cream churns to butter in a jar in five to fifteen minutes. Ultra-pasteurized (UHT) cream has been more heavily heated and tends to churn more slowly and to a softer, greasier mass. Check the carton.
- Cream temperature is the hinge for butterCream at about 60F churns fastest. Straight from the refrigerator it takes far longer; much above 65F the fat smears rather than granulating. One cup of 36 percent cream yields roughly 6 to 7 tablespoons of butter plus about half a cup of buttermilk.
- Wash the butter properlyStep 4 is not optional tidiness. Any buttermilk left in the grains sours within days and turns the butter rancid-tasting. Work it under repeated changes of cold water until the water runs clear.
- Sour milk is not what it was"Sour milk" here means raw or lightly pasteurized milk that has clabbered with its own lactic bacteria into a clean, thick curd. Modern pasteurized milk left on the counter spoils rather than clabbers and should be thrown out. To make Cottage Cheese No. 1, culture a quart of pasteurized milk with a few tablespoons of cultured buttermilk and hold it warm overnight until set.
- Heat for the curd"Just simmer" the outer water and bring the curd to roughly 110-120F, no higher. Above that the casein tightens and you get the tough, squeaky, stringy curd the recipe warns about. Expect around 6 to 8 oz of drained curd from a quart.
- Rennet tabletsThese are still sold as junket tablets in the baking or dessert aisle, and liquid rennet works as well. Dosage depends on the brand: this book's own Cottage Cheese No. 2 uses one tablet to a quart, while the dessert calls for a fraction of a tablet to 3 cups, so follow the strength stated on the packet you buy. The pepsin alternative was a pharmacy product and is harder to come by now.
- Body temperature means 98-100FBody temperature means about 98-100F -- Both rennet recipes hinge on this. Rennet acts fastest near blood heat; it is progressively inactivated by much higher heat, and as the milk cools it works more and more slowly. A thermometer removes the guesswork.
- Do not move the rennet dessertOnce poured, leave the cups undisturbed at warm room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes until firm, then chill. Jostling a setting rennet gel shears the curd and weeps whey, which is why the sauce is poured on gently at the end.
- Missing amountsSeveral fractions have not survived in this text. Reasonable working figures: about 1/4 teaspoon salt for the butter, 1/2 teaspoon for each cheese, and for the sauce roughly 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and 1 cup water.
This page comes from a school laboratory course rather than a family cookbook, and it reads like one: numbered steps, a stated reason for each caution, and a batch size small enough for a pair of students at a bench. Milk was a standard unit in early twentieth-century domestic science, chosen because a single quart demonstrates fat, casein, whey and enzyme action in one afternoon; churning cream in a Mason jar and setting milk with rennet were the two classic demonstrations. Rennet itself is an extract of the fourth stomach of a milk-fed calf, used to coagulate milk since antiquity, and it is generally said to have reached American kitchens as a shelf-stable tablet, best known under the Junket name, though the commercial dating is uncertain. The finished rennet dessert - milk barely warmed, sweetened, set soft and eaten cold - was regarded as invalid and nursery food, which is largely why it sits in a chapter meant to teach the properties of milk rather than in a dessert chapter.