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Milk and Butter
THE most exquisite nicety and care must be observed in the management of milk and butter. A housekeeper should have two sets of milk vessels (tin or earthenware, never stoneware, as this is an absorbent). She should never use twice in succession the same milk vessels without having them scalded and aired.
In warm weather, sweet milk should be set on ice, if practicable, or if not, in a spring-house. Never put ice in sweet milk, as this dilutes it. One pan of milk should always be set aside to raise cream for coffee. A bucket with a close-fitting lid should be filled with milk and set aside for dinner, one for supper, one for breakfast, and a fourth for cooking purposes. For making butter, strain unskimmed milk into a scalded churn, where the churning is done daily. This will give sweeter butter and nicer buttermilk than when cream is skimmed and kept for churning, as this sometimes gives a cheesy taste to the butter. Do not let the milk in the churn exceed blood heat. If overheated, the butter will be white and frothy, and the milk thin and sour. Churn as soon as the milk is turned. In summer try to churn early in the morning, as fewer flies are swarming then, and the butter can be made much firmer.
A stone churn is in some respects more convenient than a wooden churn; but no matter which you use, the most fastidious neatness must be observed. Have the churn scalded and set out to sun as soon as possible after churning. Use your last made butter for buttering bread, reserving the staler for cookery. Butter should be printed early in the morning, while it is cool. A plateful for each of the three meals should be placed in the refrigerator ready for use. Do not set butter in a refrigerator with anything else in it but milk, or in a safe with anything but milk. It readily imbibes the flavor of everything near it. After churning, butter should be taken up in what is called "a piggin," first scalded and then filled with cold water. With an old fashioned butter-stick (scalded) wash and press the butter till no water is left. Then add a little salt, finely beaten. Beat again in a few hours, and make up in half-pound prints. I would advise all housekeepers (even those who do not make their own butter) to keep a piggin, a butter-stick, and a pretty butter-print. To secure nice Butter for the Table in Winter.
In October and November, engage butter to be brought weekly, fresh from the churn in rolls. Wrap each roll in a piece of old table cloth, and put in a sweet firkin or stone jar which has been washed with soda water, scalded and sunned for a month before using. Pour over it a clear strong brine, which also must have been prepared at least a week beforehand, by pouring off the settlings and repeated strainings. Have a nice flat rock washed and weight the butter down with it, being careful to keep it always under the brine.--Mrs. S. T.
Recipe for Putting up Butter 2 quarts best common salt. 1 ounce pulverized saltpetre. 1 ounce white sugar.
Work the butter over three times, the last time adding an ounce of the above mixture to every pound butter. Of course, the butter is salted, when first made. Make the butter into rolls and wrap in cloths or pack in jars, within four inches of the top of each jar. If the latter is done, fill the jars with brine and tie up closely. If the former is preferred, drop the rolls into brine, prepared as follows:
To every gallon brine that will bear an egg, add one pound white sugar and one-half ounce saltpetre. Boil well and skim. Keep the brine closely covered. I have used butter on my table in May, put up in this way, and it tasted as well as when put up in October.--Mrs. R. C.
This is a working dairy protocol from a household that milked its own cows, and it depends on conditions no modern kitchen has. The terms are worth knowing; the preservation methods at the end are not repeatable today.
- Why this cannot be followed nowThe whole system rests on raw, unpasteurized whole milk churned at ambient temperature and butter held for months in brine at cellar temperature. Raw-milk butter kept unrefrigerated is a documented vehicle for Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, none of which the salt concentrations here reliably control. For butter, cultured or sweet, use a current recipe built on pasteurized cream and refrigeration.
- The saltpetre is unquantified in practiceThe saltpetre is only loosely quantified -- Potassium nitrate is regulated by weight against the weight of the food it cures, with an upper limit. Here it is blended into two quarts of salt with sugar and then dosed by the ounce of mixture per pound of butter, so the nitrate load per pound can only be estimated, since the weight of two quarts of salt is never given. Nitrate also has no useful function in butter, which is not a fermented meat cure.
- "Brine that will bear an egg"The old test for a strong salt solution, though well short of saturation: an egg is generally said to float at somewhere around 10 percent salinity and above, and accounts of the threshold vary. It is a rough gauge, and it tells you nothing about the pH, the temperature or the water activity inside a half-pound roll of butter, which is where spoilage organisms actually live.
- Blood heatAround 98F. The warning is sound dairy practice: cream churned much above that gives soft, greasy, pale butter and thin buttermilk, because the fat globules smear instead of clumping. Modern churning is generally done at 55-60F.
- Piggin, firkin, butter-stick, printA piggin is a small wooden pail with one stave left long as a handle. A firkin is a small cask, historically a quarter barrel. The butter-stick is a wooden paddle for working water out of the grains; the print is a carved wooden mold that stamps a pattern on a half-pound block. All four survive as antiques or as reproductions for home dairy hobbyists.
- Safe, spring-house, stonewareA "safe" is a ventilated food cupboard, not a refrigerator. A spring-house is a stone shed built over running water, holding roughly 50F year round. The book's stated objection to stoneware is simply that it is "an absorbent" -- presumably a worry that a porous or crazed surface holds milk residue -- though stoneware is in fact usually denser than the earthenware the book allows. The warning about butter taking up nearby odors is entirely correct and still applies in a modern fridge.
- Churning whole milk rather than creamChurning unskimmed milk daily, as described here, is the older whole-milk method. It works but takes far more churn capacity than churning skimmed cream, which was already the commoner practice and which mechanical separators later made quicker and more complete. The "cheesy taste" attributed to held cream is lactic and proteolytic souring; the lactic side of it is the process now deliberately harnessed in cultured butter.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and the initialed attributions here, Mrs. S. T. and Mrs. R. C., are typical of the book's method. Dairy management occupied this much space because butter was both a daily food and a source of cash: farm butter was widely made by rural households and sold or bartered in local markets, and its reputation depended on the housekeeper's cleanliness. The October-to-May problem the second entry addresses is real, since cows dried off or gave poor-tasting winter milk on hay, so autumn butter had to be laid down like preserves. Over the following decades the question largely dissolved: centrifugal cream separators, mechanical refrigeration and creamery consolidation moved most butter-making out of the house, and pages like this one became a record of skills rather than instructions.