Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Brine That Preserves Butter' a Year
Brine That Preserves Butter' a Year
Mrs. D. McCraney.
To three gallons of brine, strong enough to bear an egg, add one-quarter pound good loaf sugar, and one tablespoonful of saltpetre; boil the brine, and when it is cold strain carefully. Pack butter closely in small jars, and allow the brine to cover the butter to the depth of at least four inches. This completely excludes the air. If practicable make your butter into small rolls, wrap each carefully in a clean muslin cloth, tying up with a string; place a weight over the butter to keep it all submerged in the brine. This mode is most recommended by those who have tried both.
This is a pre-refrigeration keeping method, and it does not survive scrutiny. The points below explain what the words mean and why the technique should be left in the book.
- Why it failsBrine only preserves what it actually touches. A muslin-wrapped roll of butter sitting in a crock for a year has an interior that never takes up salt and never drops below room temperature, and butter carries enough water and milk solids to support Listeria and Staphylococcus aureus. The recipe specifies no storage temperature at all, which is the single missing control.
- The saltpetreOne tablespoon of potassium or sodium nitrate in three gallons of brine is both pointlessly low to inhibit anything and entirely unmeasured against the weight of butter it is meant to protect. Nitrate curing salts are dosed by weight of food today, with limits set by regulation; a nitrate figure given per volume of brine tells you nothing about what ends up in the food.
- "Strong enough to bear an egg"The old float test for a strong brine, usually reckoned at somewhere around 10 percent salt or above depending on the egg and its age. It is genuinely imprecise, which is another reason the method cannot be checked or repeated.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold as a hard cone or block and broken off with nippers, the best grade then available. Modern granulated sugar is the equivalent, and the quarter pound here is about half a cup.
- Rancidity as well as pathogensEven if the brine held, butterfat oxidises and the milk solids go on breaking down enzymatically. Twelve months at ambient temperature gives you strongly rancid butter; period cookbooks do carry directions for washing, re-working or clarifying stored butter before use.
- What to do insteadButter freezes very well, wrapped tightly, and that is the method a current source will give you. Any preserved-dairy project should follow a modern tested recipe with weights, salt percentages and a stated holding temperature.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, and its preserving chapters belong to a household economy where the summer butter surplus had to carry a family through winter. Farm butter was seasonal, cheap and abundant in June and scarce and dear in February, so the standard answers were heavy salting, potting under a seal of melted butter or salt, or immersion in brine as Mrs. McCraney describes. The saltpetre reflects the common nineteenth-century belief that nitre both preserved and kept colour bright, a habit carried over from meat curing into all sorts of keeping recipes. The confident title, promising a full year, is best read as a claim rather than a tested result.