My grandfather, whose parents immigrated to Canada from a Polish shtetl, loved farmer’s cheese. It was always on the table at breakfast in his house, next to the cereal and grapefruit halves my grandparents also liked to eat.
After my grandparents died, I forgot about farmer’s cheese until I saw a whole refrigerated section devoted to it at a local Slavic grocery. I took a tub home. It was bright, tangy, and surprisingly lean-tasting, falling somewhere in between a labne and a dry ricotta. But what exactly was it?