Word Nerd: Paneer, cottage cheese, and the vocabulary of diversity

Recently, a friend who is a professor of Italian language and culture expressed her frustration that an English-language textbook had translated “ricotta” as “cream cheese”. I remarked that it was like Indian cookbooks wrongly translating “paneer” as “cottage cheese”. She said that this was different because the author was a scholar of Italian cinema, and was referring to a film segment called “La Ricotta”, by the well-known director Pier Paolo Pasolini. So the author should definitely have known better.

Above: Ricotta (photo by fugzu, used under CC BY 2.0 licence)

That got me thinking. Presumably because of the hot climate in India, we do not have much of a cheese culture, and most of us have no reason to be cheese experts. But if we were to live in a culture where cheese is a big deal, it’s worth thinking about what we would lose if we insisted on drawing cultural parallels or equivalents where none exist. We might miss out on some of the diversity we encounter, and that would make our world a smaller than it needs to be. We would be losing out on the education that living in another culture gives us.

So, continuing with our cheese example, there simply aren’t enough types of cheese in Indian food for us to find counterparts for European cheeses. It would be a bit like trying to find French or Swiss equivalents for textile traditions such as Kanjeevaram, kinkhaab, Sambalpuri ikat, sozni, ajrakh, and so on – there just aren’t any parallels there.

So, Europe has hundreds of types of cheese, and they are eaten daily. They can be classified on the basis of whether they’re hard or soft, which animal’s milk they’re made from, whether they’re aged or fresh, and so on.

So what’s the difference between paneer and cottage cheese? Paneer is a solid cheese, usually made by adding a few drops of lime juice to hot cow or buffalo milk and draining out the whey (the liquid part after the milk has coagulated). Cottage cheese is a bit similar – but only a bit. The whey is usually not drained out completely, so the cheese is semi-solid.

Above: Paneer, and below, cottage cheese (photos by VirtualWolf and FASTILY, used under CC licence)

Having grown up using the words “paneer” and “cottage cheese” interchangeably, I found out the hard way that I couldn’t substitute one for the other when cooking. As a recently-arrived international student in the US, I bought some cottage cheese at the local supermarket. The opaque, sealed container gave me no clue about the consistency of the contents. Back in my kitchen, I had my paalak all washed and chopped, ready for cooking. Imagine my surprise when I opened the box of cottage cheese and found it full of mush!

And so I learned to stop trying to interpret everything in familiar terms. Sometimes you just have to deal with other cultures in and on their own terms. And as a reward, you get to discover every kind of delicious.

Above: Cream cheese frosting on a cupcake (photo by Ken’s Oven, shared under CC BY 2.0 licence)

By: Uma Asher