Best-Loved Cheese
Recipes
You
will find in this section the three ways to make the three
Pennsylvania Dutch cheeses. And you will find here recipes for
what are pretty much the only indigenous recipes that are made
with cheese-Cheese Cake and Cheese Pie. (You may or may not be
able to tell them apart!) The Pennsylvania German love cheese,
but they are disposed to keep it where it belongs and there is
very little adding of cheese to vegetable and meat dishes in
Pennsylvania kitchens.
Ball Cheese, Cup Cheese, and
Schmierkase take time and patience in the making-time, patience,
and space to store the crock or cheese board and a place to hang
the cheese bags. Consequently, cheese is made nowadays chiefly
on the farms. But when it is taken to the large city markets, it
is eagerly snapped up by people who remember how good it tasted
when they were young.
Someone told me not long ago
that he could remember as though it were yesterday the cheese
making in his boyhood home, as well as the time the cheese was
ruined. It seems that he and his mother heard strange popping
sounds coming from the attic and, when they investigated, there
was little brother, carefully poking a finger into each and
every cheese, saying "pop" as he did so and licking
his finger between the cheeses.
There is a German cookbook
published in this country in 1879 fur die Deutschen in
Amerika. Although it is otherwise rather elaborate, it lacks
cheese cookery.
However, in this book was found
the method of making Ball Cheese that is given here. The recipe
was not in the body of the book-it was written in pencil on the
back flyleaf. For detail, it rivals the cookbook itself; if
reproduced here in all its ramifications, it might well deter
one from cheese making forever. But it is an interesting recipe
for all that.
You are supposed to “heat the milk long enough
so it sings,” add coloring matter “the size of an apple
kernel” and “when it is thick nice, that which is in the
boiler, you set on the stove.” Then you proceed with the
cheese:
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License.
