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BUTTER, SALTED (Scottish method)
Put the butter into a tub of clean water, press it thoroughly with the hand or a broad butter-beater until the water is entirely removed. Lay it out on a board and sprinkle it with salt, an ounce to every three pounds of butter. Work and beat it well. Then make a brine strong enough to float an egg; add two ounces of loaf sugar, and boil it; when quite cold, put some of this prepared pickle to the butter, and press and squeeze off the water. If it does not come off clear, repeat the washing in fresh pickle. The kit or tub for storing is filled up within two inches of the top with butter, the pickle thrown on it, and a clean linen cloth over all. The lid of the kit must then be well secured.
This is a farm-dairy preserving method from the era before refrigeration, written for butter churned that morning from a household cow. The vocabulary is worth understanding, but the process itself is not one to reproduce.
- Why it fails todayThe butter is never heated at any stage, and the finished kit is meant to stand for weeks or months in a cool larder or cellar rather than under refrigeration. Butter made from unpasteurised cream can carry Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and pathogenic E. coli, and the moisture pockets and residual buttermilk left in hand-worked butter are exactly where those organisms survive.
- The salt level is too low to preserveThe salt level is low -- an ounce to three pounds is about 2 per cent salt by weight of butter. Salt is confined to the small water phase, where it is correspondingly more concentrated, so it inhibits rather than sterilises; Listeria in particular can grow at refrigerator temperatures in the water phase of butter. Many traditional long-keeping butters were salted considerably more heavily than this.
- Brine as a sealFlooding the kit with pickle and covering it with linen excludes air but not microorganisms; the cloth and the wooden staves are themselves impossible to sanitise. If you want salted butter, use a current, tested method rather than this one.
- "Brine strong enough to float an egg"The standard old test for a strong salt solution. Just how strong is uncertain: an egg will float well below saturation, so the test indicates a heavy brine rather than a measured concentration, and it says nothing about safety.
- Kit and butter-beaterA kit is a small coopered tub with a fitted lid, a standard Scottish butter container. The butter-beater is a broad wooden paddle or bat used to press and work butter without warming it with the palms.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken off as needed; granulated sugar is the modern equivalent. The two ounces in the brine was probably there to soften the harshness of the salt rather than to preserve.
- The point of the washingThe whole operation turns on getting every trace of buttermilk out, which is why the water is pressed off repeatedly until it runs clear. Milk solids left behind are what turn stored butter rancid and cheesy, and no amount of salt compensates for skipping it.
Butter was one of the great cash products of the Scottish and Irish farm dairy, and the coopered kit or firkin packed with salted butter under brine was how it travelled to market and got a household through the winter, when cows went dry or gave little. Salting, thorough washing and an airtight cover were the tools available: the same logic that produced the barrelled "Cork butter" traded across Britain and beyond in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, graded by inspectors on salt and quality. A late-Victorian reader might still buy butter in bulk or make it at home, so the distinctions between fresh, lightly salted and pickled butter were practical knowledge rather than nostalgia. Mechanical refrigeration and centralised creameries eventually made the kit obsolete.