Demand brings Creole cream cheese back after 1980s demise
Editor’s note: Cynthia Nobles, a member of the Newcomb College Culinary History Writers Groups, takes a look at Creole cream cheese, one of Louisiana’s heritage foods. She is the author of LSU Press’s forthcoming title “The Delta Queen Cookbook.”
Before the days of iceboxes and homogenization, Creole cream cheese was as common in south Louisiana as mosquitoes. In 19th century New Orleans, marchands, professional peddlers, carried fancy shapes of Creole cream cheese in champagne baskets balanced on their heads.
Later, most grocery stores and milk trucks stocked this unpretentious single-curd, artisan cheese, and homemakers always found that it was a good way to use souring milk.
Creole cream cheese is made from curds, the semisolid portion of coagulated milk. When the cheese was popular, it was common to find curds hanging in cloth under cool spots like live oak trees or porches to drain out the whey, the watery liquid that separates from the solid curd. The process was simple. And it yielded a lightly tart mound of silky cheese that in early Louisiana was typically served for breakfast, when sugar, cream and strawberries were favorite toppings. Creole cream cheese was also considered wholesome for the infirm and infants, while Catholic Acadians, who called cream cheese “caillé gouté,” creamed clabber, often ate it for Friday lunch.
By the early 1980s, changing culinary tastes and a government prohibition on selling raw milk almost made Creole cream cheese vanish. But by the late 1980s, public demand prompted Dorignac’s Grocery Store in Metairie to keep the tradition alive, and they started making Creole cream cheese in-house. Later, Mauthe’s Dairy, of McComb, Miss., and Washington Parish’s Smith’s Creamery made their versions and sold their products at farmers’ markets and in select stores. (Due to their dairy’s temporary shutdown, Smith’s Creamery is not making Creole cream cheese at this time.) And when Chef John Folse decided to get into the milk business, a tangy Creole cream cheese topped with half-and-half was the first cheese out of his Bittersweet Plantation Dairy.
Although local Creole cream cheese was historically coagulated with natural airborne bacteria, in the early 1900s large commercial dairies striving for consistent product texture started using rennet. Today the ingredient is called for in virtually all Creole cream cheese recipes. Rennet is the enzyme used to separate the curd and whey and was traditionally obtained from the fourth stomach of calves. Modern rennet, found in both liquid and tablet forms, can indeed come from a young animal’s stomach. But cheese-making suppliers now also offer a vegetarian coagulating enzyme that comes from plants like thistle.
Creole cream cheese is popping up more and more at grocery stores, but it will likely never regain its prominence at our breakfast tables. There is, however, a growing interest in using it as a cooking ingredient. Comparable to firm yogurt or soft marscapone, Creole cream cheese can be used in everything from hors d’oeuvres to ice cream to cheesecake. And if you can’t find it at your local wmarket, it’s super easy make your own.