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Dutch Cream Cheese
Put the yolks of five eggs into a basin with three whole eggs and beat well, then mix with them one pint of buttermilk. Take three quarts of milk fresh from the cow, pour it into a saucepan, and place it over the fire until boiling, then mix in the above mixture. Boil up once, remove from the fire, cover, and let it stand until the curd has formed. Turn the curd into a fine hair-sieve, put a weight on top, and leave it thus for twenty-four hours. Serve the cheese with cream and sugar.
A fresh curd cheese enriched with egg, closer to a set custard than to the cream cheese sold in foil bricks. Two things decide whether it works: the milk you buy, and how briefly the egg mixture cooks.
- The hinge: boil up once, no moreThe eggs are there to firm the curd, not to scramble. Stir the egg-and-buttermilk mixture into the boiling milk, let it come back to a boil for a few seconds, and pull it off the heat at once. Held longer, the egg tightens into grains and the curd turns coarse and weepy.
- Milk fresh from the cowThis means whole, unhomogenized, and not heat-treated. Ordinary pasteurized whole milk works; ultra-pasteurized (UHT) milk will not curdle properly, as the whey proteins are already denatured. Avoid it, and avoid skim, which gives a curd with no body.
- ButtermilkThe recipe assumes true buttermilk, the acidic liquid left after churning. Modern cultured buttermilk is a reasonable stand-in and is if anything slightly more acidic, which helps the set.
- Hair-sieveA horsehair sieve, the period's fine strainer. Use a fine-mesh sieve lined with two layers of damp cheesecloth or a colander lined the same way, set over a bowl deep enough to hold a quart or more of whey.
- Weight and drainingA one- to two-pound weight on a small plate laid on the curd is enough; more presses out fat along with the whey. Drain it in the refrigerator, not on the counter — a low-acid fresh cheese standing twenty-four hours at room temperature is exactly the condition the original kitchen tolerated and a modern one should not.
- QuantitiesThree quarts of milk plus a pint of buttermilk gives roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of drained curd, enough for six to eight servings.
- ServingServe cold, spooned into shallow dishes with heavy cream poured over and sugar to taste. It keeps two or three days refrigerated and no longer.
"Dutch cheese" was a common nineteenth-century American name for a simple fresh curd cheese — what elsewhere went by pot cheese, smearcase or cottage cheese — and the name is traditionally linked to the Pennsylvania "Dutch" (Deutsch), whose Schmierkäse was made from soured milk in the ordinary way of a farm kitchen; that derivation is folk tradition rather than documented fact. This version is a refinement of the thrift dish: the buttermilk supplies the acid a farmhouse would have got by simply letting the milk turn, while the eggs — five yolks and three whole eggs — enrich the curd into something rich enough to send out as a dessert under cream and sugar. That it calls for milk "fresh from the cow" is a reminder that a city kitchen of the period still expected daily deliveries of raw milk, and that boiling it was the cook's own safeguard rather than the dairy's.