My first taste of Creole cream cheese was a spoonful straight from the container, as I stood in the kitchen of an 18th-century house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I had cracked open the lid of the white plastic tub marked “Mauthe’s” to reveal the flan-shaped curd floating in a bath of whey and cream; its texture somewhere between Greek yogurt and silken tofu. I slurped the spoonful of pale yellow cheese and could not understand how skim milk with a dash of buttermilk could taste this remarkable. It was creamy but light, with the sourness of lactobacillus, and had the kind of pungent, funky barnyard flavors I’ve never experienced in a cow’s milk product.
But even beyond that, I could taste the cows because I had just spent the day with them, scratching their chins and foreheads in a field of timothy and rye grass. And I could taste the local culture, because outside the open window, I could hear the clop of mule-pulled carts, the steam whistles of ships on the Mississippi River, and the neighborhood calliope player, busking on the corner. This moment was a time capsule, a connection to the past. And while I would never be able to capture that exact moment again, it’s one that any visitor to New Orleans can find with a bite of Creole cream cheese.
Creole cream cheese is a simple, fresh cheese made with skim milk and buttermilk—byproducts of butter-making—and vegetable rennet. It’s not firm like a Philly-style cream cheese; it jiggles and splits, then melts in your mouth. Traditionally, it’s sprinkled with sugar and eaten from a dish like yogurt, which was a typical French Creole way of enjoying it, or, as locals of German descent preferred, spread on buttered bread with salt and pepper. And while it’s been made in the New Orleans area for at least 130 years, it’s a local ingredient that nearly disappeared.
The first known mention of Creole cream cheese by name dates to 1896, but “clabber”—milk that has been allowed to sour, then curdle, and is often eaten with sugar—is much older. A New Orleans newspaper account from 1849 notes a market vendor from St. Louis selling balls of “compressed clabber … to be eaten with sugar but which the old lady said was first-rate with sauerkraut.” The mention calls the sugared clabber a “curious article,” suggesting the practice was unfamiliar in the region at the time.
Historical recipes from the early 20th century simply call for it to be clabbered, then allowed to sit at room temperature overnight. The resulting single curd would be drained in a hanging cheesecloth or in small, circular, hole-studded molds that had come to be known as “Creole cream cheese molds” by the 1930s. It was still made and sold by commercial dairies in New Orleans through the 1970s.
“What was so special about it was the taste memory of it,” Poppy Tooker told me. Tooker is a native New Orleanian raconteur of Louisiana food culture, through her NPR show Louisiana Eats! and her writing. She remembers eating Creole cream cheese as a child, having it for breakfast three or four times a week. “We’d sprinkle it with a little sugar and have it with some toast before school in the morning. It was the breakfast of champions! It’s easy to understand how you’d have a longing for it.”
