A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [53]
Aleta glanced slowly into the pot, then shook her head.
“How about you, Emma?” said Katie. “It’s good. Come on—try it. Here, I’ll break you off a piece.”
She did, then handed it to Emma. She chewed it slowly, then kind of grimaced, and both girls smiled together.
“I want to try it too,” now said Aleta.
Katie handed her one of the curds and she ate it, with the same kind of reaction as Emma’s.
“It’s hard enough to pour it into the cheesecloth now,” said Katie. “We’ll need another pan.”
She went to the pantry, where most of the kitchen things were kept, and came back with another deep pot and set it on the floor. “We need to line it with cheesecloth,” she said.
She brought the roll and rolled out enough to cover the top of the empty pot, draping it down about halfway into it, then cut it off the rest of the roll with a pair of scissors.
“Emma,” she said, “can you hold the cheesecloth so that its edges don’t fall into the pot?—Here, hold it like this.”
When Emma had the cheesecloth in place, Katie and I lifted the cooking pot off the stove and carefully poured the mixture into the new pot. At first the whey came pouring out easily. Then gradually the lumps of curds plopped onto the cheesecloth. When it was empty we set the warm pot aside, then slowly lifted the cheesecloth up with the dripping curds in the center.
“Is that cheese?” asked Aleta as she watched. She sounded impressed that Katie and I would be so smart to know how to make cheese.
“Not quite yet,” I said. “But it’s halfway there.”
“Now the book says to wrap the cheesecloth around it and put a press on top of it,” said Katie. “Oh yes, now I remember—there’s a cheese press. Why didn’t I think of it before! I’ll get it.”
She ran into the pantry. I could hear her lugging the ladder out of the corner and climbing up to one of the shelves above her head. She came back a few minutes later with a small wood box contraption that I recognized from Josepha’s kitchen.
“There was a cheesecloth bag up there on the shelf with it that I’d forgotten about,” she said. “I guess we didn’t need to buy the cheesecloth after all.”
“What do you do with that?” asked Aleta, pointing at the box.
“We put the cheesecloth in the bottom of it,” said Katie. “I remember seeing my mama do it. Then fold it over the top and put the slab of wood over it with weights on top. It will press down on the curds and slowly push all the rest of the whey out of those little holes on the sides of the box until the curds get hard.”
“Won’t it make a mess?” said Aleta, following Katie outside.
“We’ll put it outside, on the worktable next to the kitchen,” said Katie. “The whey will drain out through the cloth.”
“I remember now too,” I said. “That’s exactly how Josepha did it.”
“I saw her do dat once afore I left too,” said Emma. “Why din’t I eber see you dere, Miz Mayme?”
“I don’t know, Emma,” I answered. “But I don’t reckon I was up at the big house more than once a year. You must have come after the last time I was there. Where’d you come from before Master McSimmons bought you?”
“I don’ know, someplace ober yonder. I got bought an’ sold all da time. I reckon dey din’t think I was too full a wits fer a house slave.”
“Do you know how long you have to leave it?” I asked Katie as Emma and I watched.
“Let me look,” said Katie, going back to the book.
“It says to press it for ten hours, then cover it for four days, then turn it over and rub it all down with salt, and then let it sit for six months.”
“Six months!” I said. “We’ll be out of cheese way before that.”
“You can eat it anytime, it says, but it gets better as it gets older.”
“You take the press out to the table and I’ll carry the cloth outside,” I said.
Twenty minutes later our first slab of cheese was sitting under the press, with clear whitish liquid slowly oozing out the sides of the box onto the table.
“Now it’s time to clean up the mess we made!” I said as we all walked back inside.
“We should make cheese every day, or at least every two days,” said Katie. “Now that we know how to do