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Pot Cheese
Place one quart of buttermilk and two quarts of sour milk in a saucepan, and set it over the fire till it is scalding hot; then take it off and with a skimmer remove the curd from the whey. Place the curd in a muslin bag, tie and hang it up to drain for an hour or so. Moisten the curd slightly with cream, stir in a little salt, work it well with the hands, then mould it into small balls. Pile these on a dish, cover them over, and set in a cool place till ready to serve.
A plain fresh curd cheese that depends entirely on getting the milk hot enough to separate and no hotter. A few of its assumptions no longer hold in a kitchen supplied by a supermarket.
- The hinge: scalding, not boilingBring the milk to about 175-185F, when the surface shivers and steam rises but no bubble breaks. Past a simmer the curd tightens into rubbery grains and the cheese turns dry and squeaky no matter how much cream you work into it.
- What "sour milk" meantIn 1896 it meant raw milk left to clabber on its own, thickened by lactic bacteria already present. Pasteurized milk left on the counter does not clabber; it spoils, and the resulting curd is not the same thing. Use cultured buttermilk or plain kefir, or sour whole milk deliberately with a few tablespoons of cultured buttermilk stirred in and left covered at room temperature overnight until set.
- Muslin bagA doubled square of fine cheesecloth, a butter muslin, or a clean cotton flour-sack towel gathered and tied. Ordinary loose-weave cheesecloth from a supermarket needs three or four layers or the curd runs through.
- Draining timeAn hour, as the recipe directs, gives a soft, spreadable curd. Longer draining gives something firmer and easier to mould into a ball. Draining in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature is the sensible modern practice.
- Salt and creamAbout a teaspoon of fine salt per pound of drained curd, and cream added a tablespoon at a time. Working it with the hands is not optional flourish; it breaks the curd down from grains towards a paste, which is part of what distinguishes this from a bowl of loose cottage-cheese curds.
- YieldThree quarts of milk gives roughly a pound of drained curd, less if the buttermilk is thin, enough for eight to ten small balls.
- KeepingFresh unripened cheese with no acid beyond its own and no preservative. "A cool place" meant a larder; keep it covered in the refrigerator and eat it within three days.
- The wheyDo not pour it away out of habit. It is useful in bread dough or as the liquid in pancakes.
Pot cheese is the old Hudson Valley and Pennsylvania name for the simplest of fresh cheeses, made from milk that had soured on its own and been warmed until it broke; the term is generally traced to the Dutch pot kaas tradition carried into New York, and it sat alongside "smearcase" and "farmer cheese" as regional words for much the same thing. It appears in Oscar Tschirky's book, among the terrapin and the canvasback duck. The distinction from cottage cheese is often described as one of handling rather than ingredient: cottage cheese is usually said to keep its curds separate and dressed with cream, while pot cheese is worked smooth into a paste that can be moulded, which may be why the recipe ends with balls piled on a dish rather than a bowl of curds.