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Hints on Butter-Making (No sloven can make good butter)
No sloven can make good butter. The one thing to be kept in mind, morning, noon, and night, is neatness, neatness, neatness. The milking should be done in the cleanest place that can be found, and the cows should be kept as clean as possible. Wash the teats and udders thoroughly with plenty of cold water, and wipe with a cloth or towel. Never wash with the hand moistened with milk from the cow. The least impurity taints the cream, and takes from the sweetness of the butter. Milk perfectly clean (as the last quart is twice as rich in butter as the first), and the quicker the milking is done the more milk is obtained. The milk-room should be clean and sweet, its air pure, and temperature about 62 degrees. As soon as a pail is filled, take to the milk-room and strain the milk through a fine wire-cloth strainer, kept for the purpose, and not attached to the pail (the simple strainer being more easily kept clean). Never allow milk to stand in the stable and cool, as it absorbs the foul odors of the place. The pans (flat stone crocks with flaring sides are better than tin pans. In winter hot water should be poured into them while milking is being done, and poured out just before straining the milk into them) should be set on slats, rather than shelves, as it is important to have the milk cooled from the animal heat as heat as soon as possible. Skim each day, or at longest within twenty-four hours. Souring does not injure the quality of the cream, but the milk should not be allowed to become watery. Do not use a perforated skimmer, but remove a little of the milk with the cream, as this does not injure the quality or lessen the quantity of butter, and gives more well-flavored buttermilk, which is a favorite and wholesome drink. If there is cream enough each day, it should, of course, be churned, and this plan makes the best butter, although it takes longer to churn it. If not, the cream should be set aside in a cool place, covered, and stirred thoroughly whenever more is added. It ought not to stand more than two days, and must not be allowed to become bitter and flaky. The best plan is to churn as soon as it becomes slightly acid. Scald the churn and dash thoroughly, and put in the cream at a temperature of 58 degrees. The motion of the churn will soon bring it up to about 60 degrees. When the butter comes put a quart or two of cold, soft water (or ice is better) into the churn to harden the butter, and make it easier to gather up. After gathering it as well as possible with the dash , it should be removed to the table or bowl, and thoroughly worked with a flat wooden paddle, (never with the hand, as the insensible perspiration will more or less taint the butter), using an abundance of cold soft water to wash out the buttermilk and harden the butter. By this process the buttermilk is removed quickly, and there is no need of excessive working, which injures the grain of the butter. This is especially true of that which is to be (519)
This is a working method for farmhouse butter, written when every step happened within sight of the cow. It cannot be followed today as given, and the reason is the milk itself rather than any of the handling.
- Raw milk is the problemEvery temperature in this passage — 62F for the milk room, 58F for the cream going into the churn, 60F in the churn — is chosen to favour the ripening bacteria that give cultured butter its flavour. Nothing in the process ever reaches a temperature that kills Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria or E. coli O157:H7, all of which are shed by healthy-looking cows and all of which survive churning and cold-water washing.
- Deliberate souring is not a safeguard"Churn as soon as it becomes slightly acid" means holding raw cream at cellar temperature for up to two days. Mild acidification of that kind does not reliably suppress the pathogens above; it simply means the souring organisms won you the race. Brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis, both once transmitted this way, were among the diseases that drove milk pasteurisation into law.
- Buttermilk as a drinkThe author recommends leaving extra milk with the cream so the buttermilk will be pleasant to drink. That raw buttermilk is the highest-risk item the process produces, and it is being handed straight to the household undheated. If you want cultured butter, use a current recipe built on pasteurised cream.
- What the vessels wereFor reading the text: the "dash" is the plunger of an upright dash churn; "flat stone crocks with flaring sides" are glazed earthenware setting pans; "soft water" is rainwater or any water low in dissolved minerals.
- "Sweet" and "sweet air"In this book sweet means fresh and untainted, not sugared. A sweet milk room is one with no sour or stable smell; the warning about milk absorbing stable odours is sound dairy practice and still taught, since butterfat readily takes up volatile compounds.
- The strippings claimThe note that the last quart is far richer than the first is broadly correct — fat globules are held back in the udder and the final milk drawn can run several times the fat of the first — which is why incomplete milking was reckoned to rob the churn.
- The page breaks offThe text stops mid-sentence at page 519, apparently before the salting and packing instructions. Anyone reading this as a complete method is missing the end of it.
Butter-making instructions of this kind sat in nineteenth-century American cookbooks because butter was still a household product, not a purchase: the creamery system that consolidated it into factories spread through the 1870s and 1880s, and books of that sort served readers who still set their own milk in crocks. The insistence on "neatness, neatness, neatness" belongs to the same decades in which germ theory was filtering into domestic advice — the writer cannot name a bacterium, but knows from experience that dirt, warmth and delay ruin butter, and the prohibition on touching it with the hand "as the insensible perspiration will more or less taint the butter" is a period commonplace that happens to be good hygiene. What the passage cannot supply is any test of whether the cow was healthy, and that gap is precisely what compulsory pasteurisation, arriving in American cities in the following generation, was written to close.