Skip to main content
Preserve

To Prepare Rennet to Turn the Milk

This recipe describes how to prepare rennet from a calf stomach using salt and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

To Prepare Rennet to Turn the Milk

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the stomach from a freshly killed calf and clean it thoroughly with salt.

  2. Let the cleaned stomach drain for a few hours.

  3. Stuff the stomach with 2 handfuls of salt.

  4. Sew the stomach up, or stretch it on a well-salted stick.

  5. Alternatively, keep the stomach in wet salt.

  6. Soak the stomach in fresh water for reuse.

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.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Calf stomach
Supplies the rennet enzymes that cause milk to curdle.
Coarse sea salt
Cleans the stomach and preserves it by drawing out moisture.

“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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes