Heat sour milk until the whey rises to the top. Pour it off, put the curd in a bag and let it drip six hours, without squeezing it. Put in a wooden bowl, chop fine with a wooden spoon, salt to taste, and work to the consistency of soft putty, adding a little cream and butter as you proceed. Mould with your hands into round “pats” or balls, and keep in a cool place. It is best when fresh.
Cream Cheese.
Stir a little salt into a pan of “loppered” cream. Pour into a linen bag, and let it drain three days, changing the bag every day. Then pack into a wooden cup or mould with holes in the bottom, and press two hours. Wet the mould with cold water before putting in the cream-curd. Wrapped in soft white paper—two or three folds of tissue paper will do—to exclude the air, they will keep in a cool place for a week.
This is the cheese sold in this country under the name of Neufchatel.
BREAD.
If eminence of importance entitled a subject to pre-eminence of position, that of which we are now about to speak should have stood foremost in this work. It is not a pleasant thing to think or write about, but it is a stubborn fact, that upon thousands of tables, in otherwise comfortable homes, good bread is an unknown phenomenon. I say phenomenon, because it would indeed be a marvellous estrangement of cause and effect were indifferent flour, unskillfully mixed with flat yeast, badly risen and negligently baked, to result in that pride of the notable housekeeper—light, sweet, wholesome bread. I know a household where sour, stiff bread is the rule, varied several times during the week by muffins scented and colored with soda, clammy biscuit, and leathery griddle-cakes; another where the bread is invariably over-risen, and consequently tasteless, sometimes slightly acid; yet another in which home-made bread is not used at all because it is “so troublesome and uncertain,” the mistress preferring to feed her family, growing children and all, upon the vari-colored sponges bought at the bakers—sponges inflated with sal volatile, flavorless, and dry as chips when a day old, and too often betraying, in the dark streaks running through the interior of the loaf, want of cleanliness in the kneader. Yet these are all well-to-do people, who submit to these abominations partly because they do not know how badly off they are—chiefly because it is their way of doing, and they see no reason for changing. “I have been a housekeeper for thirty years, and have always mixed my bread just so,” retorted a mistress once, when I mildly set forth the advantages of “setting a sponge” over-night. “I put in flour, yeast, and milk if I have it, and give them a good stir; then set the dough down to rise. Our folks don’t fancy very light bread. There don’t seem to be any substance in it—so to speak. Mine generally turns out pretty nice. It’s all luck, after all, about bread.”
“I’m told you have a receipt for making bread,” laughed another to me; “I never heard of such a thing in my life, and I’ve been keeping house eighteen years. So I thought I’d call and ask you for it—just as a curiosity, you know. I want to see what it is like.”
I wisely kept my thoughts to myself, and dictated the receipt, which she jotted down in a memorandum-book laughing all the while at the “excellent joke.”
“You really use this?” she demanded, when this was done.