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BUTTER-MILK STEW
Boil one pint butter-milk, add small lump butter, and sweeten to taste. Some add a tea-spoon of ginger and honey instead of sugar.
A two-line invalid's drink from the sick-room chapter, closer to a hot posset than a stew. The whole thing hinges on what happens to buttermilk over heat.
- It will curdle, and that is expectedButtermilk's proteins separate the moment it approaches a boil, giving a thin whey with soft curds suspended in it. The recipe directs boiling regardless, so the separation was evidently tolerated rather than avoided; if you want it smoother, hold it just below a simmer and stir constantly.
- The buttermilk has changedThe original means the sour, thin liquid left after churning butter. Today's cultured buttermilk is skim or low-fat milk soured with lactic bacteria, thicker and more acidic, so it breaks faster and tastes sharper. A thin plain kefir or true churned buttermilk from a dairy is closer to the intent.
- "Small lump butter"The recipe does not say how much; something on the order of a tablespoon is a fair reading. It adds richness and mouthfeel to a very lean liquid.
- Quantity and yieldOne pint is two cups, enough for two invalid's cups or one generous serving. Sweeten lightly, not to table-dessert levels; a teaspoon or two of sugar is plenty.
- The ginger-and-honey variantA teaspoon of ground ginger is a lot in two cups; ginger was a common domestic remedy for an unsettled stomach. Half that is more palatable to modern taste, and fresh grated ginger steeped in the milk works better still.
- Serve it at onceIt does not hold. Reheating drives further separation, and the whey turns watery and flat as it stands.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a full section to "Food For The Sick," reflecting a period when the household, not a hospital, nursed fevers and convalescence, and when the invalid's diet was built almost entirely from milk, eggs, gruels and broths thought to be easily digested. Soured milk drinks warmed with butter and spice belong to a long European tradition of possets and milk pottages, and buttermilk in particular was cheap, always at hand in a butter-making house, and widely credited with being gentler on a weak stomach than sweet milk. The recipe also offers a ginger and honey substitution, and ginger was a standard domestic remedy for nausea and "wind." Calling it a "stew" reflects an older, broader use of the word rather than the meat-and-vegetable dish the term now implies.