It’s easier to make cheese when you have cows, goats, or sheep with a constant stream of milk available to dip into.

When I was a youngin, my mother would, from time to time, railing at the high cost of dairy products in the grocery stores, make cheese and butter. The butter was always salted, but I don’t remember if it was frozen or just stored in the fridge.

One set of grandparents had a glass and electric butter churn which the three of us kids thought was just great, and the other set had the wooden churn my mother grew up with, and preferred, as long as there was somebody around to turn the crank.

The cheese always ended up as cottage cheese. In those days of yore, the cream that was not consumed or turned to butter, was put in cream cans and sold to the creamery. The leftover milk went to feed the farm cats and the pigs when we had pigs. When we didn’t have pigs, the skim milk was waste product.

The skim milk would be warmed in a large pot and rennet slowly stirred in. The ritual involved a glass-encased red alcohol thermometer to measure the temperature of the milk before the rennet was added. Then the curd was cut with a knife and poured into a colander lined with cheesecloth. It would be hung to drip for a period of time and then refrigerated.

At some point, the creamery closed, and for a short while, we sold whole milk. That entailed buying a bulk tank to hold the milk, and a once or twice a week pickup by a milk truck. Eventually, the state health department started upping the requirements for milking cows and storing milk, and the cows went off to the hamburger factory. The barn stayed around for quite a few years after the cows left, but it’s long gone now.

Here’s a link to the cheese story: Making Cheese with the Romans: Caseus Fumosus Velabrensis (Smoked Velabran Cheese)