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Cottage Cheese
For making this cheese the milk should Place not be too sour; as soon as it gets thick it is ready to use. the pan of milk over a kettle of hot water and heat almost to the boiling point. When it has been in the heat six or eight minutes, take a large spoon and turn the milk over by spoonfuls, bringing the hot part on top. When the whey has become so hot that it cannot be touched by the finger, turn all into a colander to drain. When free of whey, add salt generously, and butter and pepper as desired. Press the mixture into a dish, or shape it into small balls. This cheese is much improved by the addition of a few spoonfuls of cream at the time of seasoning.
A clabber cheese: milk is left to thicken on its own, then gently warmed until the curd firms and the whey runs off. The whole thing hinges on temperature restraint at the end.
- Start with the right milkThe recipe assumes unpasteurized milk that sours into a clean, sweet clabber. Modern pasteurized milk left on the counter does not clabber reliably; it spoils, because the lactic bacteria that used to dominate have been killed and nothing well-behaved replaces them. Culture a gallon of pasteurized whole milk with a few tablespoons of cultured buttermilk, or a packet of mesophilic starter, and hold it at 70-75F until it sets, usually 12 to 18 hours.
- Do not overheatThis is the point that decides the texture. "Almost to the boiling point" most likely describes the water in the kettle rather than the milk itself, though the sentence is ambiguous; in practice the milk wants to reach only about 110-120F, which is roughly where the whey becomes too hot to hold a finger in, as the recipe describes. Pushed much further, the curd tightens into rubbery granules.
- The pan over hot waterThis is a double boiler, improvised. A stainless bowl set over a pan of hot water works, and gives the slow, even heat the method needs. Direct heat scorches the curd at the bottom before the rest warms.
- Turning the milk overLifting the hot lower layer to the top by spoonfuls is deliberate and gentle. Stirring or whisking shatters the curd and sends solids out with the whey.
- DrainingA colander lined with butter muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth loses far less curd than a bare colander. Twenty to thirty minutes of draining gives a moist cheese; an hour gives a dry, pressable one.
- SeasoningThe recipe says to salt generously and to add butter and pepper as desired; a starting point of about a teaspoon of fine salt per pound of drained curd, added while the curd is still warm so it dissolves, can be adjusted upward to taste. The cream at the end is what turns dry curd into what a modern shopper recognizes as cottage cheese; two to four tablespoons per pound.
- Yield and keepingA gallon of whole milk gives roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of drained curd, more if left moist. Fresh cheese of this kind has no rind and no preservative: refrigerate it and use it within three or four days.
Cottage cheese is the plainest of the fresh cheeses and the one least dependent on equipment, which is why it turns up in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books as a matter of thrift rather than gastronomy. Any dairy that skimmed cream for butter was left with skim milk that soured quickly, and clabber cheese was one common way of using that milk rather than wasting it, though skim milk was also fed to stock; the name is generally traced to that domestic scale of production, cheese made in the cottage rather than the cheese house, with no press, rennet, or aging cellar. The book presents it as something to be made rather than bought, at a period when commercially made cottage cheese was only beginning to be sold in American shops. The instruction to add cream at the end marks the shift from a frugal by-product to a table dish.