Some friends and I need mediation. We’re in agreement that cottage cheese with fruit is a nice little light lunch or summer dinner when it’s too hot to cook. However there is disagreement concerning cottage cheese as a side dish to a sit-down meal with, say roast beef.
One camp believes cottage cheese as a side dish is decidedly low-brow and unsophisticated. If you were having a dinner party and trying to impress, serving cottage cheese would be gauche. You might as well serve jello for dessert at this point.
The other camp believes cottage cheese is perfectly acceptable and the cool, creamy texture would complement beef.
Obviously we know when we’re noshing casually it’s a non-issue; but the disagreement over the more formal setting is fierce. So which camp is right?
I definitely think of cottage cheese as casual dining. It’d be fine at a brunch, I’d say, but as a side dish at a nice dinner? Not so much. If for no other reason, it isn’t really much of an effort, is it? “Scoop out of tub with a spoon and plop onto plate,” is not usually something you’d likely find in a guide to fine entertaining. Maybe if it was sprinkled with a melange of minced fresh herbs you could get away with it. But you’d have to, at some point, ask your guests whether they enjoyed the herb melange, just to be sure they realize it’s a melange, you know?
I’m in agreement with those who say that cottage cheese would be fairly low-brow in a formal setting. Though I guess it depends on how formal we’re talking about here. If it’s just a few close friends and family, I’d say it was probably okay. But if, as you mentioned, you were trying to impress someone, if you were having the boss over for dinner, for instance, I think it would definitely be out of place (though as casual as most workplaces have gotten these days, do people really have dinner parties to impress the boss anymore?).
Of course, I might be a little biased, since I despise cottage cheese.
Good god, serve a cheese as a side dish, on the same plate as the main course?! Cheese is a separate course, served after the main course. Who raised you people?
If you do something to it - say, mix it with horseradish - then it becomes, I think, an acceptable condiment, though not exactly a side dish. There’s a mediocre BBQ joint near here that makes a fabulous cracker-spread of cottage cheese, horseradish, and some elusive mystery ingredient that will haunt me until my dying day. (Anyone know? Merle’s in Evanston, IL? What’s in it? Thanks.) It’d be damn good with steak.
But yeah, just scooped out of the carton isn’t effort enough for a dinner party.
I personally wouldn’t think of it with roast beef, for instance I wouldn’t have it on a sandwich with cold roast beef. However if someone who knows what they are doing served it to me with any meal I would assume that they meant it to be a pleasurable addition and would see how it went. Maybe you could serve the portion in something. Lately I have been getting vine ripened mini capsicums (bell peppers I think where you are). They are about the size of Roma tomatoes. Halved lengthwise and roasted they would make a perfect vessel.
A very nice restaurant in Lemont, White Fence Farm, serves it as a side dish. That being said, I probably wouldn’t serve it at a dinner party. It’s “lunch food”.
Then again, I tend to just put a fork in the pickle jar and pass it around the table, so…
What the hell? Maybe an ingredient in a side dish.
Just a dollop of cold cottage cheese sitting there on your plate during an evening meal, though? I wouldn’t feel right about that in any setting where I was free to come and go as I pleased.
A friend of mine has to have cottage cheese with every dinner, regardless of the other food being served. His father did it, so now he has to. However, he looks askance at me putting canned fruit or applesauce on top of the cottage cheese.
And it weirded out by one of the best creations there is, which I grew up on, cottage cheese and apple butter.
Serving Cottage Cheese with roast beef is not just low-brow it is sacreligious.
<sanctemonious prigg voice>
You know the white stuff usually served with roast beef in posh restaurants. It is horseraddish, I know it looks like cottage cheese from a distance to you plebs, but goodness it isn’t cottage cheese. The very thought. Go to your room at once, and no supper. </spv>
Cottage Cheese has got a poor reputation from the time in the 70’s 80’s when it was touted as the low callorie food for everyone. It got missused and stigmatised by this. It would be hard to get past that stigma these days, maybe via use of goat or sheep milk cottage cheeses but even then the name “cottage” would have to be dropped for something fancier.
I’m afraid that you’re all wrong. Cottage cheese is an abomination and should never be served anywhere under any circumstance except perhaps in maximum security prisons as a punishment for the most heinous criminals our society has.
Or perhaps as a mix with fruit for lunch, just so you have something else available. I have a mild dislike for the stuff.
I fucking love cottage cheese. I usually eat it once every day. It’s a convenient, easily-digestible way for me to get a good dose of protien, carbs and calcium and doesn’t cause lactose-intolerance flatulance. And it comes in a fat free variety. It’s milk, but better.
I don’t throw fancy dinner parties, so I’m a pretty much low-brow guy. I don’t have anything else to contribute to the discussion.
Nah. It’s chicken. Just plain old chicken. What the heck can you do to it? Personally, I like KFC better. Now what’s REALLY GOOD is their corn fritters and it’s worth going to the restaurant only cause of the cool atmosphere and you get tons of sides. Which is good because I really don’t like chicken. Except KFC.
One camp believes cottage cheese as a side dish is decidedly low-brow and unsophisticated. If you were having a dinner party and trying to impress, serving cottage cheese would be gauche. You might as well serve jello for dessert at this point.
QUOTE]
Hmmm, you do realize that until the invention of Jello, gelatine desserts [and aspics for main courses] were actually long tedious and expensive products to make in the home kitchen? They were incredibly ‘highbrow’ foods that common poor scum just didn’t make.
Personally? I would take a few of the larger leaves off a head of butter lettuce, put a scoop of full fat large curd cottage cheese in it, and dress the top with a pretty arrangement of slices of fresh juicy peaches, or kiwis, or even fresh peeled and deseeded mandarin oranges [NOT canned] and a drizzle of a fresh fruit coulis of some complimentary fresh fruit [perhaps a nice raspberry coulis on the peach, chocolate ganache on the mandarin oranges and a mango coulis on the kiwis]
