Patience and the Spider

Little Miss Muffet’s first name was probably Patience. The heroine of the nursery rhyme is assumed to be Patience Moffat, the daughter of Thomas Moffat (d. 1604), an Elizabethan physician and author. He wrote a famous book about insects, which is thought to explain the spider who sat down beside her.

Now, about that dish of curds and whey she was eating. Curds are basically casein, a milk protein that coagulates in the presence of the enzyme rennet. Acids also cause curdling, so sometimes milk is curdled by adding bacteria that produce lactic acid. Either way, the whey is the remaining liquid.

But then the whey is nearly always removed by pressing the curds, which turns them into cheese (well, there are usually a few more steps after that, such as aging). The reason is simple: Being relatively dry, cheese resists spoilage much better than curds and whey.

It’s often said that Ms. Muffet’s curds and whey was cottage cheese, but cottage cheese is a modern product. Not only is most of the whey removed, the curds are usually cooked to give them the familiar cottage cheese texture.

Possibly she was eating a once-popular dish called junket, which was something like fresh cottage cheese sweetened to make it into a dessert. Probably, though, it was just freshly curdled milk, whey and all, which had rather rural, down-home associations (as did the tuffet--a hillock or mound of earth--that she sat on).

By the way, Patience’s father, the physician, would not approve of low-fat cottage cheese. If curds were made from skim milk, he wrote, they were “utterly unwholsom, clamming [closing up] the stomack, stopping the veins and passages, speedily breeding the [kidney] stone, and many mischiefs.” These days, most doctors would disagree.