Cottage cheese, that dowdiest of dairy products, is staging a comeback, according to a recent report in The New York Times. While “comeback” may seem overblown for an item that’s been here all along, such is the hopeful nature of product marketing. Now there’s talk of artisanal cottage cheese and small-batch production – a veritable face-lift for a frumpy old food.
Too late, I say, having been a cottage cheese loyalist for the last two decades. I’ve paid my dues. Slathered on crackers for breakfast each day, the sloppy cheese and I had a good thing going – until we didn’t. Like so many breakups, this one had no single or obvious cause. Mostly, I got bored. With the blandness, the daily routine, the endless curds.
Nor have I had occasion to look back. Though I flirted briefly with rival foods – English muffins, cereal, waffles – I finally landed on nearby turf. I tinkered with yogurt, that creamy, more obliging cousin of cottage cheese, and tried a variety of flavors. But it wasn’t until I happened upon coffee yogurt that I hit pay dirt. The only remaining issue was finding a suitable accompaniment. For dunking, that is. After testing several variations of bread, I happily settled on the Indian staple naan.
Then a friend came over one day as I was preparing breakfast, and she stopped dead in her tracks.
“What on earth are you making?” she asked, closing her eyes and inhaling dramatically.
She enumerated the smells wafting through my kitchen: mocha and brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, vanilla. While I’d grown accustomed to the lovely scents that attended my newly revised breakfast, it hadn’t yet registered that these were the standard intoxicants of a bakery. My latter-day breakfast was just another name for dessert. And I was eating it first thing in the day.
Yet the signs were clear: The mingling of warm toasted naan and cool coffee yogurt was strangely redolent of, yes, ice cream and hot fudge sauce. I would dip a piece of naan into the yogurt, then turn it upside down to make sure there were no drips.
The yogurt would adhere perfectly, as if I were testing a meringue for firm peaks. And there was the particular pleasure that comes only from dessert.
These were not the simple waking flavors of breakfast, nor the complex savory tastes of dinner. This was rich, silky, smooth and sweet – a treat for nose and palate alike; a small sensory blast that distinguished this breakfast from all others.
With a resume like that, is it any wonder that cottage cheese couldn’t compete?
To those who believe that cottage cheese may be the whey of the future, the jury is still out. Breakfast and dessert are two ends of the spectrum, the yin and yang of our daily meals. But that’s a matter of habit, not law, and who’s to say the two can’t co-exist?
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