We once took occasion to give our opinion of the butter which was
largely brought to our market. The article was deemed severe; but if
they who think so had eaten of the butter they would have regarded
_that_ as the more pungent of the two. We have waited a year; and are
now prepared more fully to testify against that utter abomination,
slanderously called butter, so unrighteously exchanged in our market
for good money. Far the most part, the cream is totally depraved at
the start, and churning, working, and packing are only the successive
steps of an evil education by which bad inclinations are developed
into overt wickedness. We determined to keep an eye upon the matter;
and now give, from life, the natural history of the butter sold.
Before doing this, we will express an opinion of what is _good
butter_.
_Good butter_ is made of sweet cream, with perfect neatness; is of a
high color, perfectly sweet, free from buttermilk, and possesses a
fine grass flavor.
_Tolerable butter_ differs from this only in not having a _fine
flavor_. It is devoid of all unpleasant taste, but has not a high
relish.
Whatever is less than this is bad butter; the catalogue is long and
the descending scale is marked with more varieties than one may
imagine.
_Variety 1._ BUTTER-MILK BUTTER.—This has not been well worked, and
has the taste of fresh buttermilk. It is not very disagreeable to such
as love fresh buttermilk; but as it is a flavor not expected in good
butter, it is usually disagreeable.
_Variety 2._ STRONG BUTTER.—This is one step farther along, and the
buttermilk is changing and beginning to assert its right to
predominate over the butteraceous flavor; yet it may be eaten with
some pleasure if done rapidly, accompanied with very good bread.
_Variety 3._ FROWY OR FROWSY BUTTER.—This is a second degree of
strength attained by the buttermilk. It has become pungent, and too
disagreeable for any but absent-minded eaters.
_Variety 4._ RANCID BUTTER.—This is the putrescent stage. No
description will convey, to those who have not tasted it, an idea of
its unearthly flavor; while those who _have_, will hardly thank us for
stirring up such awful remembrances by any description.
_Variety 5._ BITTER BUTTER.—Bitterness is, for the most part, incident
to winter-butter. When one has but little cream and is long in
collecting enough for the churn, he will be very apt to have bitter
butter.
_Variety 6._ MUSTY BUTTER.—In summer, especially in damp, unventilated
cellars, cream will gather mold; Whenever this appears, the pigs
should be set to churn it. But instead, if but just touched, it is
quickly churned; or, if much molded, it is slightly skimmed, as if the
_flavor_ of mold, which has struck through the whole mass, could be
removed by taking off the colored portion! The peculiar taste arising
from this affection of the milk, blessed be the man who needs to be
told it!
_Variety 7._ SOUR-MILK BUTTER.—This is made from milk which has been
allowed to sour, the milk and cream being churned up together. The
flavor is that of greasy, sour milk.
_Variety 8._ VINEGAR BUTTER.—There are some who imagine that all milk
should be _soured_ before it is fit to churn. When, in cool weather,
it delays to change, they expedite the matter by some acid—usually
vinegar. The butter strongly retains the flavor thereof.
_Variety 9._ CHEESY BUTTER.—Cream comes quicker by being heated. If
sour cream be heated, it is very apt to separate and deposit a _whey_:
if this is strained into the churn with the cream, the butter will
have a strong cheesy flavor.
_Variety 10._ GRANULATED BUTTER.—When, in winter, sweet cream is
over-heated, preparatory to churning, it produces butter full of
_grains_, as if there were meal in it.
_Variety 11._—In this we will comprise the two opposite kinds—_too
salt_ and _unsalted butter_. We have seen butter exposed for sale with
such masses of salt in it that one is tempted to believe that it was
put in as a make-weight. When the salt is coarse, the operation of
eating this butter affords those who have good teeth, a pleasing
variety of grinding.
_Variety 12._ LARD BUTTER.—When lard is cheap and abundant, and butter
rather dear, it is thought profitable to combine the two.
_Variety 13._ MIXED BUTTER.—When the shrewd housewife has several
separate churnings of butter on hand, some of which would hardly be
able to go alone, she puts them together, and those who buy, find out
that “Union is _strength_!” Such butter is pleasingly marbled; dumps
of white, of yellow, and of dingy butter melting into each other,
until the whole is ring-streaked and speckled.
_Variety 14._ COMPOUND BUTTER.—By compound butter we mean that which
has received contributions from things animate and inanimate;
feathers, hairs, rags of cloth, threads, specks, chips, straws, seeds;
in short, everything is at one time or another to be found in it,
going to produce the three successive degrees of dirty, filthy, nasty.
_Variety 15._ TOUGH BUTTER.—When butter is worked too long after the
expulsion of buttermilk, it assumes a gluey, putty-like consistence,
and is tough when eaten. But, oh blessed fault! we would go ten miles
to pay our admiring respects to that much-to-be-praised dairy-maid
whose zeal leads her to work her butter too much! We doubt, however,
if a pound of such butter was ever seen in this place.
Besides all these, whose history we have correctly traced; besides
butter tasting of turpentine from being made in pine churns; butter
bent on travelling, in hot weather; butter dotted, like cloves on a
boiled ham, with flies, which Solomon assures us causeth the ointment
to stink; besides butter in rusty tin pans, and in dirty swaddling
clothes; besides butter made of milk drawn from a dirty cow, by a
dirtier hand, into a yet dirtier pail, and churned in a churn the
dirtiest of all; besides all these sub-varieties, there are several
others with which we have formed an acquaintance, but found ourselves
baffled at analysis. We could not even guess the cause of their
peculiarities. Oh Dr. Liebig! how we have longed for your skill in
analytic chemistry! What consternation would we speedily send among
the slatternly butter-makers, revealing the mysteries of their dirty
doings with more than mesmeric facility!
And now, what on earth is the reason that good butter is so great a
rarity? Is it a hereditary curse in some families? or is it a
punishment sent upon us for our ill-deserts? A few good butter-makers
in every neighborhood are a standing proof that it is nothing but bad
housewifery; mere sheer carelessness which turns the luxury of the
churn into an utterly nauseating abomination.
Select cows for quality and not for quantity of milk; give them sweet
and sufficient pasturage; keep clean yourself; milk into a clean pail;
strain into clean pans—(pans scalded, scoured, and sunned, and if tin,
with every particle of milk rubbed out of the seams.) While it is yet
sweet, churn it; if it delays to come, add a little saleratus; work it
thoroughly, three times, salting it at the second working; put it into
a cool place, and then, when, with a conscience as clean and sweet as
your butter, you have dispatched your tempting rolls to market, you
may sit down and thank God that you are an honest woman!