12. The Cottage Cheese ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

Robert enjoyed watching his mother make cottage cheese. She began pouring boiling water over a large stainless steel bowl to discourage bacteria. Carefully holding the lip of the bowl with a towel, she shook the water droplets out so that no water remained in the bowl. Next, she let milk fresh from the cow sit for a day or two in the bowl covered with a muslin cloth. During the first few hours, Ida removed the cloth and used a spoon to skim off the thick yellow cream that rose to the top of the milk. She skimmed the cream at least twice and saved it in the refrigerator for other recipes. After the first day, she again lifted the muslin and gently shook the bowl. If the milk looked lumpy, it was ready. If not, it waited another day. The hotter the weather, the faster the milk turned lumpy.

Ida warmed the milk on the stove on low heat for ten minutes.

Ida next set a colander into a deep bowl. She lined the inside of the colander with a muslin cloth, and she poured the warm milk slowly into the colander. She covered the colander and bowl with yet another muslin cloth, and let the milk sit for two hours or so. She then used a spatula to encourage the curd to come loose from the cloth-lined colander. The whey in the bowl was saved and mixed in very small amounts with the dry ground feed that was given to the chickens. (Too much of a dairy product was deemed harmful to poultry, while a little was considered beneficial.) Meanwhile, Ida salted the curd and poured some cream on it. The cottage cheese was ready to eat!

… and that was the sad moment for Robert.

He hated the taste and the smell of the homemade cottage cheese.

“Eat it!” Ida told him. “It’s good for you.”

She said the same thing at every meal when she served cottage cheese—and that was at least once a day each time she made a batch. (She made batches all too often!)

“Eat it! It’s good for you,” Robert heard over and over.

He could hardly get the stuff past his nose! The curd was hard, resembling little gummy rice pellets. The dollop of it on his plate held its shape, but the creamy puddle that slowly spread out from the bottom of the mound invaded the other, good food nearby, tainting otherwise desirable items with the bitterness of the cheese. Robert would eagerly lift a delectable piece of fried chicken only to discover that the bitter pool had seeped underneath and had soaked into what should have been the chicken’s crispy surface.

In Ida’s kitchen, children were to eat everything that she put on their plates. Robert was frankly astonished that Charles could eat the cottage cheese day after day, week after week. How was it possible?

“Eat it! It’s good for you.”

The creamed corn looked succulent, but oh no! The nasty cottage cheese puddle had sneaked into the creaminess of the corn, ruining the taste.

His mother did not allow Robert to get up from the table until he had eaten every morsel on the plate that she had served him. He would make his way through the chicken and the creamed corn—even though they had been contaminated by the seeping cheese. Ultimately, only the sinking mound of cottage cheese remained on Robert’s plate. What could he do with it?

He tried to hand part of it to Lady, the family’s dog whose name was inspired by Walt Disney.

“I saw that,” Ida said. “Don’t you give that cottage cheese to the dog! Eat it! It’s good for you.”

He put one granule of the cottage cheese on the tip of his spoon, held his breath, and deposited it in his mouth. He swallowed it without chewing it. Even so, the taste was disgusting. He sat for several minutes and stared at the dollop sitting on his plate. It seemed to grow larger.

“There are hungry people in the world that would love to have that cottage cheese,” Ida said. “You can’t get up from the table until you’ve eaten it.”

Everyone else had left the table long before. Everyone else had cleaned his plate. Robert sat by himself, spoon in his motionless hand, while his mother did the dishes. Every now and then, she turned back from the sink with the suds clinging to her wrists and falling onto her apron. “Hurry up and eat that!” she said.

Robert would scoop another hard, bitter, nasty granule onto his spoon, push it past his nose, clamp down on it with his jaw, and swallow it as fast as he could. Ugh!

He could not repeat the process until several minutes had elapsed.

“Do I have to eat it?” Robert pleaded.

“Yes,” Ida said. “You have to eat everything on your plate. Now hurry up!”

Robert consumed one more icky granule—an especially tiny one. He often spent an hour in this way, incrementally working his way through the mound of cottage cheese. During the hour, Robert wondered what Charles was doing. Whatever it was, it probably was fascinating. How did he manage to eat his cottage cheese so fast? Robert had ample time to ponder such questions.

Ida never relented. She was determined to teach Robert not to waste food and to appreciate the healthy food that had been prepared for him.

Robert never developed a taste for homemade cottage cheese. He always took a long time to choke down the unpalatable substance. He hoped his mother would want his plate for washing and would excuse him from the table, but Ida had an iron will. If she ever were tempted to let him forgo the cottage cheese, she certainly did not show it. She could outwait him.

No, Robert never came to like homemade cottage cheese. His revulsion toward the sour concoction carried over to store-bought cottage cheese. Although he could choke it down, store-bought cottage cheese—the taste of which was very different (far blander)—was similar enough to the homemade astringent variety that he disliked commercial cottage cheese, too.

… and so, for years—for as long as Joe had dairy cows—Robert sat at the kitchen table and stared at a mound of homemade cottage cheese. Staring at the stinking, wretched curds became one of his principal memories of growing up.