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Cottage Cheese
Mrs. Gibbs.
Pour boiling water on the thick milk in the pan in which it has turned, stirring while you pour; as soon as the milk separates from the whey and begins to appear cooked, let it settle; in a minute or two most of the water and whey can be poured off; if not sufficiently cooked, more hot water may be used; set the pan on edge, and with your spoon or hand draw the curd to the upper side, pressing out as much water as possible; if desired, it can stand a few moments in cold water; when squeezed dry, work the curd fine, rolling it between the hands; add salt and cream to taste; in very warm weather when the milk has turned quickly, it is very palatable without the addition of cream.
This is farmhouse clabber cheese, made from raw milk left in a pan until it soured and set on its own. The vocabulary is worth knowing, but the method itself belongs to a dairy that no longer exists.
- The raw milk problem"Thick milk" here means clabber: unpasteurized milk left at room temperature for a day or more until its native lactic bacteria set it into a soft curd. That same warm holding period is ideal for Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria, all of which occur in raw milk and none of which are excluded by souring. There is no culture added, no measured acidity, and no way to know which organisms won.
- Boiling water is not a cookThe recipe's only heat comes from water poured onto a cold pan of curd, with no quantity, no temperature and no timing given, so the temperature actually reached is unknown and unmeasured. "Begins to appear cooked" describes the curd tightening, not pasteurization. Nothing in this process is held at a temperature that would reliably make unsafe milk safe.
- Modern milk will not do this anywayModern milk will not behave the same way -- Pasteurization kills most of the lactic bacteria that clabber raw milk, so pasteurized (and especially ultra-pasteurized) milk left out is more likely to spoil than to set into a clean curd. The recipe assumes a raw milk with an intact native flora that most readers cannot obtain and should not use this way. Use a current cottage cheese recipe built on pasteurized milk and an added culture or acid.
- What the words meanWhey is the thin greenish liquid left when the curd separates. "Set the pan on edge" means tilt it and prop it so the liquid runs to the low side while you gather the curd against the high side. The finished cheese was often called smearcase or Dutch cheese in nineteenth-century American kitchens.
- Why no quantities appearThe measure was whatever had turned in the milk pan, and the seasoning was judged by mouth. This is a scale-free technique rather than a formula, which is exactly why it cannot be checked or reproduced with any confidence today.
- The one honest detail"In very warm weather when the milk has turned quickly, it is very palatable without the addition of cream" is a real observation that how fast the milk turns changes the character of the curd. Modern cultured versions manage the same variable by controlling fermentation time and temperature.
Cottage cheese is traditionally explained as the cheese a household made from the milk it could not sell or drink before it turned, requiring no rennet, no press, and no cellar for ageing. In German- and Dutch-descended American kitchens it went by schmierkase or Dutch cheese, and in much of the South and Midwest by clabber cheese, after the soured milk it started from. Recipes like this one, credited to a named contributor, are typical of community cookbooks assembled from the receipts of local women, which read as a record of what those cooks actually did rather than what a professional would prescribe. Mrs. Gibbs assumes her reader has a milk pan sitting in the pantry and knows by sight when its contents have turned, an assumption that places the book in the era before municipal milk supplies, pasteurization laws and the household refrigerator ended farm-pan dairying in American towns.