On every table in the land, except that of the very poor, there is one
article which appears two or three times a day all the year round, and
that article is butter. More than $300,000,000 worth of it is consumed
every year in the United States. One would therefore suppose that the
public would insist with all its might and main on having its butter
good. It does no such thing, but meekly accepts the indifferent and
often vile stuff offered by dealers--an unpalatable lubricator which I
would no more think of eating than I would axle grease.
A few years ago Miss Alice Lakey, chairman of the food investigating
committee of the National Consumers' League, said that "ninety-five
per cent. of all samples of butter submitted were adulterated. We are
eating practically no pure butter."
While there is evidence to show that butter was made four thousand
years ago, it seems to have taken some nations a long time to "catch
up with the procession." We are a long way ahead, on the whole, of
the Spaniards, who, as late as the seventeenth century, kept butter
in medicine shops "for external use only" (doubtless there were good
reasons!) and who to this day hardly know what edible butter is; or
of the Irish of that same century who are spoken of by James Houghton
as rotting their table butter by burying it in bogs. But we are
lamentably behind some of the European nations, notably the French,
Germans, Austrians, and Swiss, in the making and the appreciation of
first-class butter.
In some of our leading restaurants and hotels, as well as in expensive
clubs and the residences of wealthy families, one may come across
such butter; but one is not sure of getting the real thing even after
paying the highest price. I seldom eat it at home--there are too many
disappointments--and when I travel in the United States I rarely have
the courage to try it. In rural summer resorts we have found that the
only way to get edible butter is to make it ourselves.
As regards Europe, on the contrary, I can repeat what I have said about
poultry: that during a five months' trip in 1912 I did not once have
butter placed before me which I could not eat with pleasure.
The unwillingness of Americans to take pains in the preparation of
foods to which I have referred as one of the main indications of
our being an ungastronomic nation is strikingly illustrated in the
department of butter-making, wherein it is the chief cause of our
inferiority.
Our Government has done its best to enlighten the butter-makers. In
1904 the Department of Agriculture published, for free distribution,
Farmers' Bulletin No. 241: "Butter-making on the Farm," by Edwin H.
Webster, Chief of Dairy Division, Bureau of Animal Industry; and,
in 1905, Circular No. 56 of the same Bureau: "Facts Concerning the
History, Commerce and Manufacture of Butter," by Harry Hayward,
assistant chief. These pamphlets contain in concise form invaluable
information which, if generally utilized, would revolutionize the
butter business.
Mr. Webster refers to "the great amount of poor butter made on the
farm," and Mr. Hayward also confesses that "a very small percentage of
all dairy butter made is of really high grade."
When one reads of all the diverse precautions that must be taken
to ensure a good article, and bears in mind the characteristically
American unwillingness to take pains with the things that are put into
our stomachs, one wonders not that our butter is so inferior.
A few of the hundred-and-one precautions necessary to secure a
first-class article may be briefly mentioned. The cow must be kept
carefully cleaned, particularly the udder, and so must the hands of
the milker, and the pail which holds the milk. "The habit of some
milkers of wetting their hands with milk just as they begin is a filthy
practice and the cause of much bad milk and poor butter." There must
be no hidden, inaccessible places in the pails, nor must rusty tinware
be used, because it imparts a metallic flavor to the milk. Some of the
so-called washing powders are very objectionable. The walls of the barn
must be whitewashed, and the ventilation such that the air is changed
every few minutes. The pails must be rinsed first with cold, then with
boiling water. The milk must be removed as soon as possible from the
barn, where it readily absorbs dust or bad odors from the air, and then
stored in a cold place, far away from decaying vegetables or fruits
or other things, the odors of which it might absorb. The sun should
pervade the cold storage room but not look on the milk. If possible,
the cream should be collected by means of a separator, for the proper
handling of which there are a number of rules, the neglect of any
one of which will spoil the butter. It is absolutely necessary to
cool the cream thoroughly, immediately after separating, and to avoid
mixing of cold with warm cream. Then there are a number of directions
concerning churning; working the butter to get out the milk and water;
packing; marketing; feeding the cows, and so on, none of which can be
disregarded with impunity.
This complexity of the art of butter-making may help to explain the
situation in America, but does not excuse it, for in the gastronomic
countries of Europe people are not too lazy, ignorant, or indifferent
to turn out a first-class article every day in the year.
What I wish to call particular attention to is that all these
precautions necessary for the making of first-class butter relate to
its Flavor. _Persons buying butter for any other purpose than the
enjoyment of its Flavor are extremely foolish_, for they can get the
same amount of fat and general nourishment very much cheaper in a
hundred other ways.
It is for the sake of securing an agreeable aroma or Flavor that all
the rules just enumerated, and two-score more, must be observed. If
this is not done--if only one or two of them are neglected--there
are developed in the milk, or the cream, or the churned butter,
bacteria of a very disagreeable kind, which will convert butter that
might have been of the highest grade into a second, third, or fourth
grade article, or one quite unfit for human consumption, because of
excessively rancid, fishy, smoky, tallowy, leeky, soapy, cheesy, or
other flavors. The art of butter-making consists in eliminating all
disagreeable flavors and fostering the agreeable ones.
Renovated or process butter is made of butter in which, on account of
careless manufacture or storing, the disagreeable bacteria have so
got the upper hand of the agreeable ones that even those persons who,
because of a slender purse or an imperfectly developed sense of smell,
are contented with fourth-grade butter, refuse to buy it. This stuff
(often sold, _horribile dictu_, as "cooking butter") is subjected to
a process of purification, which makes it a wholesome and nutritious
article of diet. Yet it is sold at a much lower price, for the reason
that it is inferior in Flavor to good butter.
The long and fierce fight between the butter-makers and the
manufacturers of oleomargarine is also in the final analysis, a
question of Flavor.
Oleomargarine is a mixture of vegetable and animal fats, diversely
mixed. This mixture is churned with milk to impart a butter Flavor;
or there is added to it more or less butter, in which case it is
known commercially as butterine, although legally it is classified as
oleomargarine.
If made honestly, of clean material, and unadulterated with borated
Chinese egg-yolks, or with preservatives, oleomargarine is a perfectly
unobjectionable and wholesome food. The trouble is that, as Dr. Wiley
has pointed out (1911), "there has been a constant disposition on
the part of dishonest manufacturers and dealers, since the time when
oleomargarine became a commercial commodity, to sell it as butter.
Although the penalties of National and State laws are very severe in
this respect the practice is continued. The opportunity for gain is
so great that the cupidity of the manufacturer overcomes his fear of
punishment and disgrace."
There has been much outcry because of the special tax on oleomargarine
and the severe laws against selling it as butter. As a matter of fact
these laws should be even more severe and much more rigidly enforced.
The practice of selling it as butter not only defrauds the consumer
but it tends to drive real butter out of the market, since such butter
cannot be produced at nearly so low a cost as margarine, especially
if made with the care and expenditure of time necessary for the
production of first-class butter. The best butter costs five or six
times as much as the best margarine. It is needless to say that in the
compounding of "butterine" the best butter is not likely to be used.
By mixing milk or butter with his fats, the manufacturer of margarine
confesses that his own product lacks the one thing which gives butter
its advantage, for table use, over a dozen other fats that might be
chosen--its appetizing Flavor, which makes it digestible and enables
us to eat it with relish every day in the year. It is owing to this
superiority that pure butter is entitled to legal protection against
unfair competition.
It might be argued that the American farmer, whose butter is, as we
have seen, usually of a low grade, does not deserve the protection
the Government gives him against the underselling of the margarine
maker, because good oleomargarine is preferable to bad butter. Such
protection is, however, due to the associated system of manufacture
known as creameries. The creamery, which in 1900 had already usurped
one-half the butter business in the country, "has done much," as Mr.
Hayward remarks, "to improve the quality of American butter, and if all
butter came direct from creameries there would be no such quantities
sold by producers at prices which are often actually below the cost of
production, as is the case at the present time."