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Cottage Cheese II
Heat one quart sweet milk to 100° F., and add one junket tablet reduced to a powder. Let stand in warm place until set. Beat with a fork to break curd, turn into a bag made of cheese-cloth, and let hang until whey has drained from curd; then proceed as with Cottage Cheese I.
A rennet-set fresh cheese rather than a cultured one, which makes it faster and milder than the sour-milk method of Cottage Cheese I. The whole thing hinges on the milk you buy.
- Ultra-pasteurized milk will not setUltra-pasteurized milk sets badly -- UHT processing leaves the casein poorly available to rennet, and you will get at best a weak, soupy curd rather than a clean one. Use ordinary pasteurized whole or skim milk; ultra-pasteurized and shelf-stable cartons are unreliable here.
- Junket tablets are rennetThey are still sold as junket or rennet tablets, and liquid animal or vegetable rennet works as well. One tablet is more than a quart needs at modern tablet strengths; a fraction of a tablet, on the order of a quarter, crushed and dissolved in a tablespoon of cool unchlorinated water, is nearer the mark. Too much rennet gives a tough or bitter curd.
- 100°F preciselyUse a thermometer. Below about 85°F the set is slow and weak; much above 110-115°F the enzyme starts to lose activity. Warm the milk, take it off the heat, then stir the dissolved tablet in for a few seconds only — continued stirring breaks the forming gel.
- "A warm place"A turned-off oven with the light on, or a covered pan sitting in a sink of 100°F water, holds the temperature well enough. Setting takes 15 to 45 minutes; the curd is ready when a knife drawn through it leaves a clean edge.
- DrainingLine a colander with damp cheesecloth if you would rather not hang a bag. Twenty to thirty minutes gives a moist curd; an hour or more gives something dry and crumbly. Save the whey for baking or soup.
- Proceeding as with Cottage Cheese IThat recipe finishes the drained curd with salt and cream or milk to soften it. Season and moisten to taste; check the quantities against Cottage Cheese I as printed rather than working from a fixed ratio.
- Yield and keepingA quart of milk gives about 6 to 8 ounces of finished cheese — one modest bowl. It has no acid to protect it, so refrigerate at once and eat within two or three days.
Rennet tablets reached American home kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the coagulating extract that cheesemakers had long taken from calves' stomachs began to be sold in standardized commercial form; the word junket, long used for a rennet-set milk dish, served cookbooks of this period, including this one, as the generic term. Their household appeal was the junket dessert — sweetened milk set into a soft, quivering custard without eggs or an oven — and this recipe simply borrows the same tablet for a savory end. Fannie Farmer gives two cottage cheeses side by side, one relying on milk souring on its own and one on rennet, which gave a predictable curd in under an hour.