Sunday, March 23, 2008

Cottage Cheese

A number of bloggers have mentioned the cottage cheese made by parents and grandparents. Some have wondered how to prepare it in the old fashioned way. Here is an original recipe, courtesy of Ethel Montgomery. (You may have some trouble obtaining the proper ingredients and kitchen furniture.)

Schmierkase (cottage cheese) made the old fashioned way:

Put a large amount of sour milk in a large pan. A granite dish pan works best. The pan of milk is set on the back of a wood-burning cook stove which is still warm after cooking a meal. When the sour milk becomes tepid-warm the whey and milk solids separate.

After separation, the milk is poured into a muslin bag then tied to a wire clothes line and left to drain for several hours. (Whey can be fed to the pigs.) When the curd has drained dry it is removed from the bag and stored in a stone-block milk house in the coolest place available. To prepare it for eating it is crumbled, seasoned with salt, and a generous amount of separated cream added. 

Good luck with your preparations! Don't look in your local kitchen supply store for granite dish pans or wood-burning cook stoves. Also stone-block milk houses are currently in short supply.

Happy Easter, everyone!

4 comments:

Phil Foust said...

excellent, Gary ... and memory serves the dish superb!

If the recipe is not followed exactly might your fingers be smote? (If you know what I mean?)

Diane Archer Bradbury said...

Ethel Montgomery was my third grade teacher and I really liked her. I wonder how many lives she touched in her long career at C.V.

I'm not surprised that she knew how to make cottage cheese. It seemed to me at the time that she knew just about everything.

For some reason I remember her
telling us that her dad told her she would have made a great boy because she was very precise and accurate in helping him do some carpentry.

Jay D. Mills said...

Gary, I'll look around. All of these things must still be available here in Panama. Certainly we have enough dairy farms as the road to my property outside of Volcan is lined with nothing but dairy farms for miles (kilometers). I will probably try one of the easier on-line recipes though...

Gary White said...

Let us know how your cottage cheese making goes. Hope the result meets or exceeds your memories from a youth in CV.