Name: Cream Cheese
Ingredients: 1 quart of cream; rennet (sufficient to coagulate in twelve hours); fine canvas cloth; damp cloth; weight

Cream Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

Warm the cream in hot water until it reaches the temperature of fresh milk.
Add rennet and stir gently with a spoon.

Press and drain

Place the mixture on a frame covered with fine canvas cloth.
Transfer it to a damp cloth and place it in a bottomless box or frame.
Cover with a well-fitting board and add a weight.
Let it stand for a few hours.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Cream: Provides the fat and milk solids that form the soft, rich body of the cheese.
Rennet: Enzyme that coagulates the cream into a curd that can be drained into cheese.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.