If I told you I’d just bought some Dutch cheese, you’d probably think I meant Gouda or Edam, but that’s not what it meant a century ago. Then it was nothing more nor less than cottage cheese and was the name used throughout the northern US, except in eastern New England, which I’ll come to later.
This word came to mind this week as I watched my intrepid daughter making some Dutch cheese at home. For the genuine article you start with raw milk and let it sit until it turns sour and thickens, like yogurt. Store-bought, pasteurized milk that turns sour goes down the drain, but raw milk is different. With its “good bacteria” intact, it ferments into what is called “clabber.” Heat the clabber, let the whey separate, and then strain it. The dry curds that are left are sometimes called “farmer’s cheese.” Adding milk or leaving some of the whey gives you a moist Dutch cheese.
Clabber is short for “bonny clabber,” borrowed from Gaelic (“bainne clábair” = “sour thick milk”). The Scots-Irish brought it to Appalachia and eastern New England where it hung on into the 1960s at least. As it migrated to the west into Upstate New York it switched vowels to “clobber” or dropped its initial “c”, giving “lobbered/loppered milk.” Whatever it was called, it was eaten with sugar or syrup to combat the sourness. But if it’s Irish, why “Dutch” cheese? Probably because the Dutch of New Netherlands were making it too, though they called it “potkaas.” This became “pot cheese” in English, a term that spread from Dutch areas of the Hudson into New Jersey, eastern New England and Upstate New York, overlapping with “Dutch cheese.”
There are even more regional names. When the milk begins to sour in the South and Midlands they say it’s “blinky,” the first step to “clabber cheese,” which in the Deep South was “blue john,” or in Louisiana “cream cheese”—how confusing! The Germans of Pennsylvania call clabber “thick milk” (dickemilch), which they use to make “smearcase” (spreadable cheese or cottage cheese). “Smearcase” eventually extended into the US Midlands and in Maryland narrowed its meaning to a custardy cheesecake still found in Baltimore. Now, a company using smearcase as a brand name is advertising frozen cottage cheese in different flavors as a “protein-packed” treat. Ironically, it’s made in the Hudson Valley and sold in metropolitan New York City, where once “pot cheese” reigned. Perhaps the oldest names of all that came to the colonies from England were “curd” for clabber, giving us “curd cheese” or Miss Muffet’s favorite, “curds and whey.” “Curd” was still used in the South, New Hampshire and Maine up to 50 years ago.
Maybe some of you are thinking, “Raw milk? Isn’t that what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is advocating? What about safety and pasteurization?” Apparently, the dangers are minimal, so some states are loosening the restrictions on selling raw milk in response to demand. We’ll see how that goes when new figures come in on sickness.
Why did all these words disappear? Because people stopped making cheese at home, even farm families. I never heard of Dutch cheese or pot cheese growing up on the farm but my grandfather told me he used them all the time when he was a boy. Between our two generations the big cheese manufacturers came into being and national brands meant the need for universally recognizable names. My grandfather told me he didn’t know what cottage cheese was when he first heard it, but had to start using it to have people understand him. He wasn’t happy about it, but the dictates of corporate America forced him to surrender.
In honor of my forebears, I tried to bring this word back when my children were little, exclusively using “Dutch cheese” to get that word out there, but … I failed. Though they still know what I mean, I can’t get them to use it themselves. It seems affected. It’s a Herculean task to buck up against an entire industry and undo the linguistic homogenization that accompanied the introduction of homogenized milk.
Well, my daughter is demonstrating that the old folk arts can come back. Maybe there’s hope for the words that go with them.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
Do you have a word that you’d like to know more about? Email news@ledgertranscript.com with WORDS in the subject line and we’ll get your word to Dale.