Smearcase, Schmierkäse

You have a way with words.

Hi, my name is Linda Deteren. I live in St. Augustine, Florida.

Hi, Linda. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.

My dad would always call cottage cheese smear case. He said his mom would put milk in a pillowcase and hang it on the clothesline. And he was a man who liked to embellish his stories a little bit, so I’m not really sure if it’s true. I don’t know where it came from. There’s a few of those, you know.

So you and your dad are sitting on the couch, and he just blurts out of nowhere about cottage cheese and pillowcases and smear case?

Well, we probably had it. My mom always cooked a three-course meal, so we always had a salad. So sometimes she’d put cottage cheese on a pineapple or something. So he would say, oh, yeah, smear case.

Tell us a little bit about his background.

He was born in Ohio. He grew up on a farm. He became a self-made millionaire. He started his own company and moved to New England in the 50s and started his own company, and he did well. And, you know, he just always reminded us about his farm years and growing up and how he’d walk two miles in the snow. But he was lucky he had an older brother, so he could walk in his footprints and stuff like that, you know.

Okay, okay.

Well, Grant and I are both perking up our ears about the fact that he lived in Ohio, grew up there. And it sounds like he had a sort of, what would you say, corny sense of humor?

Yeah. He would talk cheesy jokes.

Yeah. So he told you that his mom would put milk in a pillowcase and hang it on the line, and that’s how you got smear-cased?

That’s how you got cottage cheese. That’s how they got it.

Okay. Cottage cheese, yeah.

All right. And did you buy that, or did you think he was pulling your leg?

Well, I always wanted to believe him. I did kind of buy it. But, you know, why would he make it up, too? But you never know. I never know with him.

Well, yeah, yeah. Maybe to be entertaining, because when you talk about smear case, that is a food word that goes back to a German. Part of that that’s throwing you off is the Käse in German means cheese. And so it’s Schmeerkäse in German, which means smear cheese. And it’s a kind of soft cheese, like cottage cheese.

And this was a term Schmeerkäse that was used in Pennsylvania Dutch and nearby areas like Ohio to mean cottage cheese. It was kind of the forerunner of cream cheese. And you see this term smear case in a lot of places in the United States that are places where a lot of Germans settled, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and also the hill country of Texas, where a lot of Germans settled. And yeah, so it comes from German, meaning literally smear cheese, smear case. The case part coming from the German word for cheese.

But we’ve got to get to the core of this. Did people actually make it by using the pillowcase as a cheesecloth?

Not that I know of, but Grant, do you know anything about a recipe for that?

Yeah, yeah, you actually could do it. I mean, any cloth with the right weave could be used to make cheese and to use it as the cheesecloth. It could be a pillowcase. It could be any sack-like bit of cloth. And you could hang it on a clothesline or anywhere because you need to drain out the liquids and circulate the air.

Okay. But it doesn’t come from the case part of pillowcase.

Yeah, the case is just a coincidence.

Yeah, smear case. That case, like you said, is just, in German, it’s K-A-S-E, which means cheese. And it’s just a coincidence that we have case and pillowcase. Different case.

Got it. I know. It’s just, no, I never wanted to eat it the way he described how they made it.

Oh, you don’t want to eat most of the foods that you eat if you find out how they’re made. That’s the whole concept.

Shamir kasa.

That is true. That’s great information. Thank you so much.

Yeah, pleasure, Linda. Give us another call sometime.

All right. Take care of yourself.

All right. Well, you too. Have a great week.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Linda.

Bye.

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