Sometimes with The Recipe Tin Project, you come across a recipe that sounds just odd enough that you absolutely have to try it. Cottage Cheese Cookies is one of those times. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen cottage cheese used in a cookie, so I was instantly intrigued. Would they be chewy? Would they taste like cottage cheese? Why use cottage cheese in the first place? I just had to find out. Here they are:

The Recipe Tin Project is a project where I cook my way through an old recipe tin full of vintage recipes. But you might have already guessed that. It’s chock full of old recipe cards, most of which seem to be from the ’60s and ’70s. I love food history, and the idea is to breathe new life into these recipes from the past and maybe learn a technique or two from them along the way. The recipes come from different people with different handwriting and some have sweet illustrations while others are on plain (often smudged and stained) index cards.

This one is a plain lined index card with easy-to-read blue cursive and the name Evelyn Thomas written across the top. The ingredients are listed in a line down the front with a check mark next to the eggs, for whatever reason, and then the instructions appear on the back. The instructions are just three short sentences with a note that this makes “many, many cookies.”

It must, since it calls for five and a half cups of flour and four eggs, so I went ahead and halved the recipe. There’s also no specification of when to add the ingredients so I just assumed that you mix everything together all at once and that worked just fine. These make a very soft dough that you want to chill overnight before rolling into balls and dipping in powdered sugar, but are otherwise a very easy cookie.

The verdict on cottage cheese in a cookie?

I think it serves much the same purpose that ricotta does in a dessert and so you end up with a very soft cookie that’s moist and has no crunch at all. You can’t taste the cottage cheese, but it does mute the chocolate flavor a bit so next time I try these I’d experiment with bumping up the cocoa powder or maybe adding some melted chocolate. They’re a nice little cookie, unlike anything I’ve really had before and they’d be right at home in a holiday cookie swap type of situation.