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To Manage a Dairy (Quarts of water of the same)
quarts of water of the same temperature as above, and well knead the whole mass into a smooth dough. This is hard work if done well. Then cover the dough and leave it for an hour. In cold weather both sponge and dough must be placed on the kitchen hearth, or in some room not too cold, or it will not rise well. Before the last water is put in two tablespoonsful of salt must be sprinkled over the flour. Sometimes the flour will absorb another pint of water.
After the dough has risen it should be made quickly into loaves; if much handled then the bread will be heavy. It will require an hour and a half to bake, if made into four-pound loaves.
The oven should be well heated before the dough is put into it. To try its heat, throw a little flour into it; if it brown directly, it will do.
To make Butter.
Let the cream be at the temperature of 55° to 60°, by a Fahrenheit thermometer; this is very important. If the weather be cold put boiling water into the churn for half an hour before you want to use it; when that is poured off strain in the cream through a butter cloth. When the butter is coming, which is easily ascertained by the sound, take off the lid, and with a small, flat board scrape down the sides of the churn, and do the same to the lid; this prevents waste. When the butter is come the butter-milk is to be poured off and spring water put into the churn, and turned for two or three minutes; this is to be then poured away and fresh added, and again the handle turned for a minute or two. Should there be the least milkiness when this is poured from the churn, more must be put in.
The butter is then to be placed on a board or marble slab and salted to taste; then with a cream cloth, wrung out in spring water, press all the moisture from it. When dry and firm make it up into rolls with flat boards. The whole process should be completed in three-quarters of an hour.
In hot weather pains must be taken to keep the cream from reaching too high a heat. If the dairy be not cool enough, keep the cream-pot in the coldest water you can get; make the butter early in the morning, and place cold water in the churn for a while before it is used.
The cows should be milked near the dairy; carrying the milk far prevents its rising well. In summer churn twice a week. Wash the churn well each time with soap or wood-ashes.
To cure Hams.
For each ham of twelve pounds weight: Two pounds of common salt; 2 ounces of saltpetre; + pound of bay salt; pound of coarse sugar.
This should be reduced to the finest powder.
Rub the hams well with it; female hands are not often heavy enough to do this thoroughly. Then place them in a deep pan, and add a wineglassful of good vinegar. Turn the hams every day; for the first three or four days rub them well with the brine; after that time it will suffice to ladle it over the meat with a wooden or iron spoon. They should remain three weeks in the pickle. When taken from it wipe them well, put them in bags of brown paper and then smoke them with wood smoke for three weeks.
This page is three separate sets of instructions run together by the printer: the tail end of a household bread recipe, a full method for churning butter, and a ham cure. The bread and butter sections are workable with modern equipment; the ham cure is not, and the reasons are set out below.
- The ham cure is the problemThe quantities are damaged in the original text — "+ pound of bay salt" and "pound of coarse sugar" have lost their fractions — so the salt-to-meat ratio cannot be reconstructed. Two ounces of saltpetre per twelve-pound ham is also far above the nitrate levels permitted in modern curing, where nitrite is measured in parts per million using a premixed cure. Anyone wanting to cure a ham should work from a current recipe with weighed percentages.
- Three weeks of wood smokeThe smoking described is cold smoking: ambient-temperature smoke over weeks, with the meat never reaching a temperature that kills pathogens. That process depends entirely on the cure being correct and on a cool, controlled environment, neither of which this text specifies. It is not a method to improvise.
- Raw cream butterThe butter here is churned from unpasteurised cream skimmed off standing milk. Butter made from raw cream carries the same risks as raw milk itself, and the buttermilk wash does nothing to reduce them. Modern home butter is made from pasteurised cream, which behaves identically in the churn.
- The temperature that matters55–60°F for the cream is the hinge of the butter method and the book is right to insist on it. Too cold and the fat will not coalesce; too warm and it comes greasy and soft, with butterfat lost into the buttermilk. Take the cream out of the refrigerator and let it sit until a thermometer reads in that range.
- Washing the butterThe repeated rinsing with spring water is not optional fussiness. Residual buttermilk is what makes home butter turn rancid within days; wash until the water runs completely clear, then work the moisture out against a board. Well-washed salted butter keeps for weeks refrigerated.
- A stand mixer replaces the churnCream at the stated temperature will break in a stand mixer with the whisk in ten to fifteen minutes — through whipped cream, then a grainy stage, then a sudden separation into grains and liquid. Cover the bowl at that point or the buttermilk will spray. Scraping the sides, as the book advises for the churn, still applies.
- Oven heat by flourThrowing flour in to see whether it browns "directly" is a brick-oven test for a hot oven; the book gives no figure, and modern equivalents suggested for this test vary widely, somewhere in the region of 400–450°F. Four-pound loaves at an hour and a half suggest an oven falling from that heat as it bakes, which is how a wood-fired oven behaves and a modern one does not.
- The bread fragmentThe text begins mid-recipe, so the flour quantity and the sponge are on the preceding page. What survives is sound advice: two tablespoons of salt sprinkled over the flour before the last water, a proofing spot that is warm rather than cold (the book says the kitchen hearth or a room not too cold), and minimal handling when shaping.
Mackenzie's compilation belongs to a genre of nineteenth-century books that assumed a household might still keep its own cows, bake its own bread in a built oven, and put down a ham in autumn — a run of tasks that could fall to one household in sequence, which is why they sit on one page here. The butter instructions are notably precise for the period: the specified 55–60°F and the insistence on a Fahrenheit thermometer are unusually exact at a time when much cookery direction still ran on rules of thumb. The aside that "female hands are not often heavy enough" to rub a ham properly is a reminder of how these books divided labour, and the direction to milk the cows near the dairy reflects the belief that jostled milk creams poorly. Saltpetre — potassium nitrate — was a standard curing agent for centuries, valued for the pink colour and the keeping quality it gave; that its safe dose is very much smaller than a nineteenth-century cook assumed is a twentieth-century finding.