Yeah, we're not really clued-in on "dry" cottage cheese, either.

In our experience, small-curd cottage cheese is fairly dry and large-curd is pretty wet, but that may be a function of having the same amount of liquid filling different sized gaps between the curds.

We can find cottage cheese in large and small curd, and ranging from nonfat to 4% milk fat, and without salt, and mixed with pineapple or peaches or more unusual fruit combinations, and with active cultures, but we have not been able to find dry cottage cheese.

Our solution would be to put more cottage cheese than you need for your recipe in a fine mesh strainer, suspend it over a bowl, cover the whole thing in plastic wrap so it doesn't absorb any other flavors, and put it in the refrigerator for some number of hours – perhaps overnight – until a certain amount of the moisture drips out. At the point you think you have dry cottage cheese, you can begin making your cheesecake.

Depending on whether the cheesecake is too dry, too moist, or just perfect, you will ascertain whether you succeeded in producing dry cottage cheese – and satisfying the whims of a troublesome recipe writer.