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TO MAKE ARTIFICIAL BUTTER
Render beef suet at a very low temperature, churn it in fresh buttermilk and yolks of eggs, and treat like butter, when removed. POUNDED GLASS-mixed with dry corn-meal, and placed within the reach of rats, it is said, will banish them from the premises; or sprinkle cayenne pepper in their holes.
SPOTS ON VARNISHED FURNITURE are readily removed by rubbing them with essence of peppermint or spirits of camphor, and afterwards with "furniture polish" or oil.
The first sentence is a home version of early oleomargarine; the two paragraphs that follow it are unrelated household hints that the compositor ran into the same block. Neither the butter nor its neighbours should be attempted.
- Why this one failsRendered suet is beaten into raw buttermilk and raw egg yolks, and nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill anything. The finished mass was then kept and spread like butter.
- Raw yolks and raw buttermilkIn 1877 the buttermilk came straight from the churn, unpasteurised, and the eggs were untested. Salmonella in yolk and a range of organisms in raw milk are the specific risks; an emulsion held at kitchen temperature is a growth medium, not a preservative.
- Real butter keeps, this does notButter survives because it is roughly 80 per cent fat with a small, usually salted water phase. This preparation adds protein-rich milk and egg to fat with no salt, which is the opposite of a keeping formula.
- Pounded glassThe rat remedy in the middle of the paragraph is a non-food substance being deliberately mixed with cornmeal and left about the house. Ground glass is a serious injury hazard to children, pets and livestock, does not reliably kill rodents, and has no place near a kitchen.
- Spirits of camphorThe furniture hint calls for camphor spirit, which is toxic if swallowed. It is a cleaning note, not a food note, and is printed here only because the section is a catch-all.
- If you want a spreadable fatUse a current commercial product or a modern recipe with measured pasteurised ingredients. Nothing in this entry can be corrected by adjusting times or temperatures.
Margarine was developed in France by the chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès at the end of the 1860s, in response to a call for a cheap butter substitute for the army and the urban poor, and the process — rendering beef fat at low heat and working it with milk to imitate butter's texture and flavour — spread quickly to the United States in the 1870s. Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in exactly those years, and this entry is a household cook's shorthand version of an industrial process. Dairy interests fought back hard: the federal Oleomargarine Act of 1886 taxed and licensed the product, and in the 1890s several states required it to be sold uncoloured or even dyed pink. The placement of the recipe here, wedged between a rat remedy and a furniture polish in the miscellaneous pages, says something about how the compilers regarded it — a curiosity of domestic economy rather than cookery proper.