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Crackers and Cheese
Mash a cream cheese, season, and shape in balls, then flatten balls, and serve on butter-thin crackers.
NOTE. Cream cheese is very acceptable served with zephyrettes or butter-thins and Bar le Duc currants. Cottage Cheese I Heat one quart sour milk to 100° F., and turn into a strainer lined with cheese-cloth. Pour over one quart hot water, and as soon as water has drained through, pour over another quart; then repeat. Gather cheese-cloth around curd to form a bag and let hang until curd is free from whey. Moisten with melted butter and heavy cream, and add salt to taste. Shape into small balls.
Two short cheese-course entries: a cracker canapé and a home-made fresh curd. The second is really a dairy exercise, and the hinge is the water — three quarts of hot water poured through the curd is what firms it and washes out the sourness.
- Start with cultured milk, not spoiled milkIn 1896 "sour milk" meant raw milk left to clabber naturally, which is not a safe practice with modern milk supplies or modern raw milk. Use pasteurized whole milk soured with buttermilk or a mesophilic culture until it has set to a soft clabber.
- 100°F is a thermometer numberTake the soured milk to blood heat and no further; above about 110°F the curd tightens and turns squeaky. Warm it slowly in a water bath rather than over direct heat.
- The hot-water rinsesEach quart should be genuinely hot, poured gently over the curd in the cloth. This is a curd wash: it firms the grains, rinses off lactic acid, and is the difference between mild cottage cheese and something sharp and chalky.
- How long to hangThe original gives no time. One to three hours at cool room temperature is usual; drain longer for a drier curd, and refrigerate if the kitchen is warm.
- YieldA quart of milk gives roughly a cup of finished curd, about 6 ounces — a garnish quantity rather than a bowl of cottage cheese.
- "A cream cheese"The phrasing points to a small individual fresh cheese sold as a unit, closer to Neufchâtel than to a modern brick of cream cheese. Soften about 3 ounces and expect it to mash more loosely than the stabilized supermarket product.
- Zephyrettes and butter-thinsBoth were commercial crackers of the period: very thin, plain, crisp and unsalted or lightly salted. A water cracker or thin table cracker is a reasonable stand-in.
- Bar-le-Duc currantsThe whole-fruit currant preserve from Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, seeded by hand and suspended in a loose jelly. A good red currant preserve is the practical substitute; the point is tartness against the bland cheese.
These entries sit alongside the salads in the book; in the American dining rooms Fannie Farmer wrote for, cheese was commonly served at the close of the salad course rather than as a course of its own — a small ball of fresh cheese, a thin cracker, and something sweet-tart alongside. The cottage cheese recipe belongs to an older world than the cracker canapé: souring surplus milk and draining the curd in a cloth was routine household dairying, and versions of it appear under names like Dutch cheese, smearcase and pot cheese throughout nineteenth-century American cookbooks. That she numbers it "I" tells you the book expects more than one method. The Bar-le-Duc note points the other way, toward imported delicacies then reaching American grocers; the preserve is generally traced to medieval Lorraine and was already a luxury item, prized for the labor of seeding each currant.