Page:Hand-book on cheese making.djvu/39

 the factory building. I would place the whey vat ten rods away from the factory, and if night delivery of milk was the rule, I would move it twenty rods off. Get it at least beyond contaminating distance, and then have the whey carried to it in open tin troughs. If the troughs are thoroughly painted you need not fear rust, and as they are of metal they cannot dry up, warp, and leak. Have the spouts about the factory perfectly tight so that no whey can fall to the ground, for it is fearful stuff to generate offensive effluvia. Try and keep the whey receptacle as neat and clean as possible. Have it roofed, but open on the sides. Skim the cream from it every morning, and it would be much better if you would churn it fresh instead of keeping it for weeks to be rendered out in a kettle by fire. Scrub the vat out every day with a broom; it will take five minutes' time and a pailful of hot water. Make it a rule for each patron to draw away no more than three pails of whey for every hundred pounds of milk delivered. Also, make it a rule to yard nobody's pigs or calves about the premises for convenient whey slopping. Insist on it that if your patrons insist on drawing sour whey home in their milk cans they put on extra "elbow grease" afterward in cleansing them. A cheese maker hardly likes to make the imputation to patrons that their wives are not neat (only, perhaps, when they are in a great hurry) about scalding out the sour whey from milk cans, and yet such insinuations on his part are often necessary.

Curd is first cut with the horizontal knife, to facilitate easy expulsion of the whey.

Cheese is a good edible, because, besides being highly nutritive, the rennet or gasticgastric [sic] juice it contains aids digestion and the assimilation of other foods.