I Made Cottage Cheese Biscuits with a Recipe from 1958 (and I’ll Make Them Again with One Change)

I’ve never met a biscuit I didn’t like. I love mile-high buttermilk biscuits with melt-in-your-mouth layers; fluffy cinnamon-dusted biscuits with dollops of blueberry preserves; cheesy garlic biscuits with flecks of caramelized cheddar—if it’s buttery and flaky, I want to eat it!

Being a lover of retro recipes and vintage cookbooks, I stumbled upon this recipe for cottage cheese biscuits in Carnation’s Easy-Does-It Cookbook from 1958. I firmly believe one can never have too many biscuit recipes in their arsenal, so I had to put this recipe to the test.

How to Make Cottage Cheese Biscuits

ingredients for Cottage Cheese Biscuits measured out into various bowls on a wooden table

Like most biscuit recipes, the steps here are simple: mix dry ingredients, cut in butter, stir in liquid, cut into rounds and bake. In the original 1958 instructions, butter is cut into the flour using a handheld pastry cutter; if you don’t care to do things the old-fashioned way, make these cottage cheese biscuits in the food processor.

Ingredients

2 cups sifted flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 cup soft butter
1/2 cup cottage cheese
3/4 cup evaporated milk

Directions

Step 1: Preheat the oven

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Step 2: Mix dry ingredients

In a bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, cayenne pepper and celery seed.

Step 3: Cut in butter

Cut butter into dry ingredients with a pastry blender until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal.

Step 4: Stir in wet ingredients

mixing dough with a wooden spoon i na large glass bowl

Add the cottage cheese and milk. Mix with a fork or wooden spoon.

Step 5: Roll out dough and cut biscuits

using a cookie cuttter to cut out circles from a sheet of Cottage Cheese Biscuit dough

Turn dough onto a lightly floured board and knead gently.

I recommend having at least 1/4 cup of flour in a small pile on the side of your board. The dough is rather sticky right after mixing, and you’ll need to add more flour while kneading and folding the dough. Add extra flour, as needed, a little bit at a time, until the dough just stops being sticky.

Roll dough about 1/2-inch thick and cut into biscuits.

Step 6: Bake

Bake for 12-15 minutes until brown. Cool for at least 5 minutes, then serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

You can brush them with melted butter right after they come out of the oven for a little extra richness!

Here’s What I Thought

Cottage Cheese Biscuits on a cutting board

These cottage cheese biscuits are a dream recipe: super simple and spectacularly delicious. They’re crispy on the outside, and soft, pillowy and perfectly moist on the inside. There is no strong, pronounced flavor from the cottage cheese, but they are richer—the cheese giving the biscuits a more buttery flavor, without adding extra butter.

The biscuits are best eaten the day you make them, but if you have leftovers, they’ll stay moist and tender for at least a day. (For long-term storage, wrap individually and store in the freezer.)

The celery seed gives the cottage cheese biscuit a slightly sweet note, with the cayenne showing up on the back end of every bite. I, personally, would add a little more cayenne next time I made these, but the amount of spice is up to you. The texture of these biscuits is so great, I’d recommend playing around all sorts of different seasonings—like ranch powder or Old Bay—to come up with your own special “secret” recipe.

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