No. 3698

Cream Cheese

Fromage a la Creme

Put two quarts of milk into a vessel and keep it in a cool place until it curdles, then pour this curdled milk on a hair sieve to drain, and pass it through the same sieve, standing over a deep vessel; add to it a little salt and half as much firmly beaten, unsweetened whipped cream. Take some heart-shaped tin molds, perforated with small holes, each mold one inch deep and three and a half inches long; line them with pieces of muslin and fill with the above; place these in the ice-box for two hours. When ready to serve invert on a plate, lift off the muslin and serve, accompanied by some thick and very cold cream.

← No. 3697 Cheeses Salted Almonds, Cheeses & Fresh Fruits No. 3699 Fresh Fruits →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is the classic coeur à la crème, and the finished dish is still made today — but the first line of Ranhofer's method, souring milk on its own in a cool corner of the kitchen, is the part that no longer works. The notes below explain the vessels and the terms, and why the curdling step fails now.

Why the souring step failsIn 1894 the two quarts would have been raw milk carrying its own population of lactic bacteria, which acidify it and set it into clabber. Modern pasteurized milk has had most of that souring flora killed off and is instead recolonised by whatever survives or enters afterwards; left in a "cool place" until it thickens, it is as likely to putrefy as to clabber, and there is no dependable way to tell which has happened. The curd is then eaten without ever being heated.
Raw milk is not the fixSubstituting raw milk reintroduces the original hazard: Salmonella, Listeria, Shiga-toxin E. coli and Campylobacter all survive and can multiply during an ambient-temperature set, and nothing in this recipe kills them. Ranhofer's kitchen accepted that risk; a current recipe using a measured starter culture or drained commercial fromage blanc should be used instead.
"Cheeses" in this chapterThe section heading does not mean cheese-making. It appears to mark the cheese course of the dinner, sitting between the sweets and the fruit — the entries either side of this one are "Cheeses" (No. 3697) and "Fresh Fruits" (No. 3699) — and this fresh, barely-set curd was served there alongside the firmer cheeses.
Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used because it was fine, flexible and did not react with acid. A nylon drum sieve or fine-mesh strainer is the modern equivalent; the instruction is to drain the curd first, then push it through the same mesh to smooth it.
The moldsPerforated heart-shaped tins one inch deep and three and a half inches long — small individual molds, not the single large heart sold now. Perforated porcelain coeur à la crème molds are still made; the muslin lining is what lets you lift the curd out intact.
"Half as much" creamRead as half the volume of the drained curd, in whipped and unsweetened cream. The recipe adds no sugar at any stage; the only accompaniment it names is thick, very cold cream.
Ice-boxAn insulated wooden chest cooled by a block of ice, running warmer and less evenly than a refrigerator. Two hours there is a draining and firming step, not a cure, and it does nothing to make an ambient-soured curd safe.

A Little History

Fromage à la crème — better known now as coeur à la crème, from the heart-shaped perforated mold — belongs to a French farmhouse tradition of fresh, unripened cheeses eaten within a day or two of setting: milk left to clabber, drained in cloth, lightened with cream, and served with fruit, sugar or nothing at all. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, included it in The Epicurean (1894) among the "cheeses" that closed a formal dinner, where its plainness was the point after a long procession of sauced dishes. The recipe is also a small record of what a nineteenth-century kitchen could take for granted: that milk arrived unpasteurized and would sour predictably on its own, needing no culture, no thermometer and no more equipment than a sieve and a cool shelf. Pasteurization, which became general in American cities in the following decades, ended both the hazard and the convenience in the same stroke.