Whether skimming off the cream or drawing off the milk be practiced,
the question arises as to the proper time for performing the operation.
The more general practice is to "skim" just as the milk gives
unmistakable signs of acidity, or thickens a very little on the bottom
of the pan or can. A few prefer to skim the cream sweet, and still
another few let the milk lopper. This wide divergence of opinion and
practice shows how very imperfectly is the real philosophy of butter
making understood; but, notwithstanding this, each one is usually very
tenacious in his belief as to the superiority of his own practice. A
few fancy butter makers say that the finest butter is made from sweet
cream, raised in cold air by shallow setting. It is insisted by them
that airing and oxydizing, and not souring, is what "ripens" cream and
fits it for easy churning, while this airing and oxydizing imparts
the fine aroma so much desired in the finest butter. This view of
the origin or development of flavor is sustained by experiments made
at Cornell University, at the suggestion or under the supervision of
Prof. L.B. Arnold. It is also claimed that the lack of flavor and the
short-keeping of sweet-cream butter churned from cream raised by deep
setting is due to its lack of oxygen, and that souring the cream thus
raised, before churning, both oxydizes it and imparts a ranker and
more positive flavor resulting from the effects of the lactic acid. We
think both propositions look reasonable, and we should like to see a
series of scientific experiments made to determine both the effects of
oxygen and the effects of lactic acid on the butter product of cream.
At present, theory and practice vary so widely with different butter
makers who turn out a high-priced butter for the market, that one is
led to doubt all theories and query whether the quality of butter does
not depend on something not yet known, which is independent of all
current theories and practices.