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Cottage Cheese
Pour some boiling water into a pan of clotted sour milk. Stir, turn it into a colander, pour a little cold water over it, salt and break it up. A richer way is to put equal parts of buttermilk and thick milk into a kettle together over the fire, heat it until nearly ready to boil, pour into a linen bag and let it drain until the next day. Then remove, salt and put in a little cream or butter, according to whether it is thick or not, and make up into balls the size of an orange.
Two methods for farm-dairy curd, written for a kitchen that took delivery of raw milk daily and let it sour on purpose. Neither method can be reproduced safely with what is now sold as milk, and the notes below explain where each one breaks down.
- Why the first method fails nowIt depends on raw milk clabbering: souring cleanly under the lactic bacteria already present. Pasteurized milk has had most of that flora killed off; when it sours it is generally being spoiled by whatever recontaminated it, which can include pathogens, and it does not reliably set into a proper clot. Pouring boiling water into the pan warms the curd but is unlikely to bring the whole mass to a pasteurizing temperature, so nothing in the process can be relied on to kill what grew there.
- Why the second method fails nowHeating to just under boiling is sound, but the curd then hangs in a linen bag until the next day, many hours at whatever temperature the room happens to be, in the range where surviving and airborne organisms multiply freely. The recipe gives proportions but no absolute quantities, no temperature and no acidity target, so there is no way to judge whether the drain is safe. Use a current fresh-cheese recipe instead.
- Clotted sour milk and "thick milk"Both phrases mean the same thing: raw milk left to stand until it sets to a solid, jelly-like clabber, also called loppered or bonny-clabber milk. It is a deliberate product of the old dairy, not milk that has gone off, and it has no supermarket equivalent.
- Buttermilk has changedIn 1896 buttermilk generally meant the thin liquid left in the churn after butter came, usually sour because the cream had been ripened before churning. Today's cultured buttermilk is thickened low-fat milk soured with a commercial starter; it may behave differently when heated and will not necessarily give the same curd.
- The linen bagA close-woven linen or cotton drain bag, of the same kind as a jelly bag. Butter muslin is the modern counterpart; ordinary loose-weave cheesecloth lets fine curd through.
- Balls the size of an orangeThe drained curd is pressed into orange-sized balls, a way of presenting fresh curd at table rather than as a scoopable tub product.
Cottage cheese is among the plainest and most domestic things in Oscar Tschirky's book: unripened curd made from milk that had already turned, the by-product of a dairy that could not afford to waste anything. The name is generally traced to exactly that setting " cheese made in the cottage from what was left after the cream was skimmed and the butter churned, as against the pressed and aged cheeses of a commercial dairy. American cooks of the period also knew it as pot cheese, Dutch cheese, clabber cheese and, in German-speaking households, schmierkase, and versions of it appear in nineteenth-century household manuals. Its presence in a Waldorf-Astoria collection is a reminder that Oscar's 900-odd pages were aimed at the household cook as much as the hotel brigade, and that in 1896 a great deal of what a New York kitchen made still began with raw milk standing in a pan.