While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).
Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.
The last time I wrote about cottage cheese in this column it was 2017, and my subject was Helen Gurley Brown, the once celebrated editor of Cosmopolitan, whose diet I’d read about in a (slightly crazy but also fascinating) group biography by Laura Shapiro called What She Ate. By her own volition, Brown’s greatest achievement in life, apart from making widely available all that very good advice about orgasms, was to be thin, and in the cause of this, on weekdays she survived on a diet comprising only tuna, cottage cheese and an apple. In those days – the 60s – it was low fat rather than high protein diets that were all the rage, and cottage cheese, helpfully, is made from skimmed milk. However, I suspect too that it spoke to the unavoidable timidity of the chronic dieter. Its sheer blandness would never induce, as a slice of brie or roquefort might, the desire for seconds – or any desire at all.
If you’d like to try cottage cheese made in the traditional way, you’ll need a muslin bag or to visit a proper dairy – and even then it’s no great shakes: inoffensive at best. But the fact is that most of it is made in industrial quantities in factories, where the curds, which taste of nothing very much, are carefully kept bright white, in the manner of teeth that are overly bleached. In a way, you could say that cottage cheese seems to have very little to do with food at all. Like one of those minimalist, magazine-shoot houses, where the spines of all the books have been turned to face the wall, and no painting or keepsake is permitted to spoil the pristine “calm”, it is joyless and cold: neutrality on a plate.
Who on earth, I can’t help but wonder, really wants this, and why? The simple answer, I guess, is that in a culture that runs 24/7 on boasting and selfies, just about anything can be optimised, even fetishised – up to and including, it seems, the very definition of the soft and the savourless.
