Where Does Butter Come From?

     I found a quart of heavy whipping cream in the
refrigerator.  It had expired over a month ago.  My wife
pondered what to do with a quart of sour cream.  I wonder how
many people would simply throw it out.

     I said "Why not make butter?"  How many people have
ever seen butter made the old-fashioned way?  When I was a
young boy I watched Grandma make butter.  Sometimes I helped
by pumping the dasher in the churn.

     My grandparents had a small farm.  As was common in
the area, the farm included a small dairy heard.  By today's
standards the heard was infinitely small, five to eight cows.

     The cows would freshen (for city slickers that means they
had calves and started giving milk) in February or March. 
Caves have to eat.  My grandparents didn't want to use up whole
milk feeding calves.

     At each milking Grandma saved out a couple of quarts of
milk in a pan for each calf.  The pans set on the pantry shelf for
a couple of days.  The cream came to the top.  Before feeding
the calves Grandma skimmed the cream from the top of the
pans.

     The calves got skimmed milk mixed with a powder
supplement called "Calf Manna."  The cream went into a crock. 
Twice a week Grandma churned the then sour cream into butter.

     The churn was a crock five gallons or so in size.  It had
a wooden cover with a round hole in the top for the dasher
handle.  The handle had a wooden X on the bottom.  Pumping
the handle up and down stirred the cream causing the butter to
float to the top.  Pumping the churn was fun, for a while. 
Sometimes the butter took at least forever to separate.  Adding
some cold water to the cream aided the separation.

     After the butter floated to the top, Grandma skimmed it
off and put it in a wooden butter bowl about a foot and a half in
diameter.  She then added cold water and used a wooden butter
paddle to work the water through the butter.  This washed the
butter milk out of the butter.  The final step in the bowl was
adding coloring, if needed, and salt.

     Grandma then formed the butter into one pound bricks
with her butter mold. It was a wooden box just the right size to
hold a pound of butter.  It had a plunger in the top to push out
the brick of butter.

     The natural color of butter is anything from orange to
white.  The color of the butter also depends on the color of the
cow.  Different breeds of cows produce different colors of butter. 
When the cows were on green grass in the spring, the butter was
very yellow to orange.  In the dry summer the butter was nearly
white.

     Armed with all this knowledge I was ready to make
butter.  I didn't have a churn handy.  A mere quart of cream
would have gotten lost in a churn anyway.  My wife set up her
mixer and put the aged cream in the bowl.  I put the mixer on
low and let it rip.

     A few minutes later a thick scum was forming on the top
of the bowl.  I stopped the mixer.  The final separation required
a gentler agitation.  I worked it with a spoon.  Soon the butter
was separated.  I skimmed it into a bowl and worked cold
water through it a couple of  times to rinse out the buttermilk.

     I had over a half pound of very pail yellow butter. 
Disregarding the half hour or so I invested in "Project Butter,"
that beats pouring the cream down the drain.

     The survivalists who are planning to survive the collapse
of civilization might want to add this column to their scrap
books.

                                 * * * * *
                                  * * * *
                                   * * *
                                    * *
                                     *
Copyright 2013
Albert D. McCallum