The following statements were made by those receiving premiums from the New York State Agricultural Society:
"Number of cows kept, eleven. Cheese made from two milkings, in the English manner; no addition made of cream. For a cheese of twenty pounds, a piece of rennet about two inches square is soaked about twelve hours in one pint of water. As rennets differ much in quality, enough should be used to coagulate the milk sufficiently in about forty minutes. No salt is put into the cheese, nor any on the outside during the first six or eight hours it is pressed; but a thin coat of fine Liverpool salt is kept on the outside during the remainder of the time it remains in press. The cheeses are pressed forty-eight hours, under a weight of seven or eight cwt. Nothing more is required but to turn the cheeses once a day on the shelves."
"The milk is strained in large tubs over night; the cream stirred in milk, and in the morning strained in same tub; milk heated to natural heat; add color and rennet; curd broke fine and whey off, and broke fine in hoop with fast bottom, and put in strainer; pressed twelve hours; then taken from
hoop, and salt rubbed on the surface; then put in hoop, without strainer, and pressed forty-eight hours; then put on tables, and salt rubbed on surface, and remain in salt six days, for cheese weighing thirty pounds. The hoops to have holes in the bottom; the crushings are saved, and set, and churned, to grease the cheese. The above method is for making one cheese per day. As in butter-making, the utmost cleanliness is required in every part of the cheese-making premises."
CHAPTER IV.
SHEEP
With the exception of the dog, there is no one of the brute creation which exhibits the diversity of size, color, form, covering, and general appearance, which characterizes the sheep, and none which occupies a wider range of climate, or subsists on a greater variety of food. In every latitude between the equator and the arctic, he ranges over the sterile mountains, and through the fertile valleys. He feeds on almost every species of edible forage, the cultivated grasses, clovers, cereals and roots; he browses on aromatic and bitter herbs; he crops the leaves and bark from the stunted forest shrubs, and the pungent, resinous evergreens. In some parts of Norway and Sweden, when other resources fail, he subsists on fish or flesh during their long and rigorous winters, and if reduced to necessity, he eats his own wool.
He is diminutive like the Orkney, or massive like the Teeswater. He is policerate or many horned; he has two large or small spiral horns like the Merino, or is polled or hornless like the mutton sheep. He has a long tail like our own breeds; a broad tail, like many of the eastern; or a mere button of a tail, like the fat-rumps, discernible only by the touch. His coat is sometimes long and coarse, like the Lincolnshire; short and hairy, like those of Madagascar; soft and furry, like the Angola; or fine and spiral, like the silken Saxon. His color, either pure or fancifully mixed, varies from the white or black of our own country, to every shade of brown, dun, buff, blue, and gray, like the spotted flocks of the Cape of Good Hope
and other parts of Africa and Asia. This wide diversity is the result of long domestication, under almost every conceivable variety of condition.