Best Cheese Recipes

• Ball Cheese

• Cheese Cake I

• Cheese Cake II

• Cheese Pie I

• Cup Cheese

• Mrs. Hollenbach's Cheese Custard Pie (II)

• Schmierkase (Cottage Cheese)

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:

Pennsylvania Dutch Did You Know?
The origin of the word 'Dutch' is a "folk-rendering" of the Pennsylvania Dutch's own self-designation Deitsch. There is also some speculation among scholars that "Dutch" is actually an archaic term that was used to refer to all people of Germanic descent, and that is the term that stuck in the English-speaking community. It corresponds to German Deutsch and the Netherlands' "Diets," meaning 'of the common people' as opposed to the learned lords and clerics who had mastered Latin.