cottage cheese

8 July 2026

Cottage cheese is a very soft and mild cheese made from skimmed milk by adding an acid, such as vinegar or lemon juice, to the milk, causing the curds to separate from the whey. It is not aged. It has a high protein-to-fat ratio and is therefore considered a healthy cheese. The name presumably comes from the idea that is easily produced in a farm cottage.

Because it is so simple and easily produced, people have probably been making and eating cottage cheese since antiquity, but the name is comparatively recent. The name is first recorded in the United States in 1831. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the July 1831 issue of the magazine Lady’s Book, an article that was subsequently reprinted in other publications. The article describes a somewhat less-than-appetizing repast that includes cottage cheese:

The aspect of the tea-table was not inviting. Every thing was in the smallest quantity that decency would allow. There was a plate of rye-bread, and a plate of wheat, and a basket of crackers; another plate with half a dozen paltry cakes, that looked as if they had been bought under the old Court House; some morsels of dried beef on two little tea-cup plates; and small glass dish of that preparation of curds, which in vulgar language is called smear-case, but whose nom de guerre is cottage-cheese, at least that was the appellation given it by our hostess.

And also from July 1831, there is this from the Poughkeepsie Journal, which describes a rather novel use for cottage cheese curds:

I was much pleased with cutting up your little globes and taking out the dear little cubes, for very agreeably brought to remembrance the juvenile method of studying crystallography, as a tea-table amusement, by cutting up cottage cheeses with an couteau de le beurre, into various primitive molecules, or nucleus of crystals.

Sources:

Miss Leslie. “Country Lodgings.—A Sketch.” Lady’s Book (New York City), July 1831, 49/2. ProQuest: Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2018, s.v. cottage cheese, n.

Tyro. “Items.” Poughkeepsie Journal (New York), 6 July 1831, 3/3. Newspapers.com.

Photo credit: Ken Hammond, US Department of Agriculture, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr. Public domain photo.