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Hints on Butter-Making (Packed as it keeps longer when)
packed, as it keeps longer when well washed. If to be used immediately, the washing may be less thorough. Another and better plan is to remove the butter to a marble slab and lay on the top of it a piece of ice. As it settles down by its own weight, work it up around the edges with the paddle, and the water from the melting ice will wash out and carry off the buttermilk. Before or during the churning, the bowl (which should never be used for any thing else) in which the butter is to be salted, should be filled with scalding water, which should remain for ten minutes; pour out and. rub both bowl and paddle with hard coarse salt, which prevents butter from sticking. Rinse thoroughly and fill with cold or ice-water to cool. After washing butter free from milk, remove to this bowl, having first poured out the cold water, and (the butter-bowl and paddle should occasionally be scoured with sand or ashes, washed thoroughly with soap-suds, and rinsed until all smell of soap has disappeared) work in gradually salt which has been pulverized by rolling, and freed from foreign substances. If wanted for use, one-half ounce of salt to the pound of butter is sufficient, but if wanted for packing, use three-fourths of an ounce or even an ounce of salt. Use only the best quality of dairy salt. After salting, cover with cotton cloth soaked in brine, and set away in a temperature of about 60 degrees for twelve hours. Work the second time just enough to get the remaining buttermilk out. This, however, must be done thoroughly, as otherwise the acid of the buttermilk will make the butter rancid. At the end of the second working it is ready for use, and should be kept in a clean, sweet place, as it soon absorbs bad odors and becomes tainted. The air of a cellar in which are decaying vegetables soon ruins the sweetest butter. In packing for market (ash butter tubs are the neatest and best packages) soak the package for twelve hours in brine strong enough to float an egg, pack the butter in evenly and firmly, having first put in a thin layer of salt. If the tub is not filled by the first packing, set away until next churning, in a cool place, with a cotton cloth wet in brine spread over the butter, and place cover carefully on the tub. When filled lay over the butter a cotton cloth (from which the sizing has been washed) soaked in strong brine, nail up the tub, and set away in a clean, cool place until ready to sell. In packing for family use, work into rolls, lay in large stone crocks, cover with brine strong enough to float an egg (one pint of salt to a gallon of water), in which a level tea-spoon of saltpetre and a pound of white sugar to each two gallons have been added; over it place a cotton cloth and a weight to keep the butter under the brine, and tie a paper over the top of crock. Or, pack in a stone jar, pressing it solid with a wooden pestle, cover with a cloth wet in brine, and sprinkle over it salt an inch thick. More sugar may be added to the brine without injury; if butter is to be kept a long time it is a good rule to always make brine so strong that salt will lie at the bottom of the jar. Some boil and skim the brine and when cold, pour it over the butter. When ready to pack the next churning, remove the cloth with the salt carefully, rinsing off with water any that may have been scattered in uncovering it, pack butter as before, replace cloth with salt over it, and repeat until jar is filled to within two inches of the top, cover all with cloth, add salt to the top of crock, tie paper over the top, and set in a cool place. In removing for use each churning comes out by itself.
This is the tail end of a dairy-house procedure for washing, salting and packing farm butter for months of storage. It is worth reading as a document of how butter was kept before refrigeration, but it is not a procedure to follow: the preservation depends on raw cream, cellar temperatures and cure quantities that no current food-safety guidance supports.
- Raw cream, no kill stepFarm butter of this period was churned from unpasteurized cream, often deliberately ripened (soured) for flavour. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would destroy Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella or pathogenic E. coli, and the scalding described is applied to the bowl, not the butter.
- The 60-degree holdThe salted butter is left standing twelve hours at about 60F, then packed and set away in a 'clean, cool place' (the text mentions a cellar only in warning against one holding decaying vegetables). That temperature is squarely in the range where surviving pathogens can multiply in the residual buttermilk.
- Saltpetre in the brineA level teaspoon of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to two gallons of brine is an uncontrolled cure. Nitrate curing salts are now sold pre-diluted and used by measured weight against the weight of food precisely because eyeballed additions cannot be verified, and whatever nitrate contributes in a butter brine is marginal at best.
- Brine "strong enough to float an egg"The float test is a density check, not a measurement; the text itself gives one pint of salt to a gallon of water in one place and elsewhere says simply to add salt until it lies undissolved on the bottom. Preservation depends on the salt concentration actually achieved in the butter's water phase, which this method never establishes.
- Buttermilk is the hingeThe one technical point the writer is right about, and states plainly: any buttermilk left in the butter turns it rancid. Every step here — the ice on the marble slab, the second working — exists to drive out residual milk, since fat itself keeps but milk solids do not.
- Terms in the text"Dairy salt" is a fine, additive-free salt sold for butter and cheese; "sizing" is the starch finish on new cotton cloth, which had to be washed out before the cloth touched food; an "ash butter tub" is a staved wooden tub of ash, a non-resinous wood that does not taint the butter.
- Quantities, if you are reading rather than cookingHalf an ounce of salt to the pound of butter is roughly 3 percent by weight — heavily salted by modern taste, where 1 to 2 percent is usual. The three-quarter to one ounce rate for packing butter is a preservative dose, not a seasoning one.
- If you want to make butterUse a current recipe worked from pasteurized cream and keep the result refrigerated or frozen.
Butter-making was the classic cash crop of the American farm wife: cream from the household cows, churned and worked in a dedicated bowl, then packed in tubs that went to the village store against credit. The quality of what arrived at market was notoriously erratic, and the 1870s and 1880s saw a wave of instruction — in farm papers, agricultural society reports and cookbooks like this one — aimed at teaching "gilt-edged" butter-making so that country butter could compete with the creameries then spreading through the dairy states. Almost every detail here is a defence against taint: the bowl kept for nothing else, the sand-and-ashes scouring, the warning about cellars holding decaying vegetables, the rinsing until no smell of soap remains. Butterfat absorbs odours readily, and a single off note could drop the price of a whole tub. The Dixie Cook-Book was published in Atlanta in the 1880s.