Buto

“ Thy milk shall make us tubs of butter.
The bishop with his foot may burn it [8] ,
But with his hand the dean can churn it.
How are the servants overjoyed
To see thy deanship thus employ'd!
Instead of poring on a book,
Providing butter for the cook!
Three morning hours you toss and shake
The bottle till your fingers ake:
Hard is the toil, nor small the art,
The butter from the whey to part:
Behold a frothy substance rise;
Be cautious, or your bottle flies.
The butter comes, our fears are ceas'd ”

“ Here, for the first time since our departure from the coast, honey, clarified butter, and, greatest boon of all, milk, fresh and sour, were procurable. The man who has been restricted to a diet so unwholesome as holcus and bajri, with an occasional treat of kennel-food,—broth and beans,—will understand that the first unexpected appearance of milk, butter, and honey formed an epoch in our journey. ”

“ Butter.—Of all articles of food butter has most fully received the attention of the sophisticator, because it is the most costly of the ordinary articles of diet, and because its composition is so intricate and variable that its analysis presents extraordinary difficulties and its nature exceptional and various opportunities for admixture with foreign substances. It is the intention of the producer of butter to separate the fatty portion of the milk as completely as is practicable from the other constituents of the milk without destroying the fat-globules. ”

“ There are two sorts of butter, salt and fresh. Now, nobody is so fond of butter as I am; but butter (as I have often told everybody) isn't butter at all unless it is salt. The other kind is merely an inferior vaseline—the sort of thing you put on the axles of locomotives. Imagine, then, my disgust, when I took my first breakfast in these rooms eleven months ago, to find that the housekeeper had provided me with a large lump of vaseline!
I hate waste in small things. Take care of the little extravagances, I say, and the big ones will take care of themselves. ”

“ In the kingdom of Brazil, among the native population, at least, no such thing as butter, in any shape, has ever yet been known.
Fresh butter is sufficiently difficult of digestion; but salted butter is much more so; and this is the main point to which I wish to call your attention. Why, what is our object in salting down butter? Is it not to prevent change? Would it not otherwise soon become acid and disagreeable? And does not salting it so harden or toughen it, or, as it were, fix it, that [Pg 205] it will resist the natural tendency to decomposition or putrefaction? ”

“ Butter in England, France, and Italy is simply solidified cream, with all the sweetness of the cream in its taste, freshly churned each day, and unadulterated by salt. At the present moment, when salt is five cents a pound and butter fifty, we Americans are paying, I should judge from the taste, for about one pound of salt to every ten of butter, and those of us who have eaten the butter of France and England do this with rueful recollections. ”

“ The Eastern Arabs allay the torments of thirst by a spoonful of clarified butter, carried on journeys in a leathern bottle. Every European traveller has some recipe of his own. One chews a musket-bullet or a small stone. A second smears his legs with butter. ”

“ There is one necessary of life which you are obliged to dispense with, and that is butter, which is only likely to appear in the houses of the very rich, or at one or two of the best hotels in Havana. There is an appalling decoction called mantiquella, which is kept in a bottle, and poured out for the benefit of American and English visitors, who are asked to believe it is butter! ”

“ Owing to this subdivision of the fat, and perhaps to the composition of the fat itself, butter is a more digestible fatty article of food than lard or oil. It is not possible by mechanical means to remove the whole of the water and curd of the milk from the butter; indeed “overworking” the butter with the object of removing the water as completely as possible ruins the structure to such an extent as to make the product unmerchantable. ”

“ That is the flesh-substance which was contained in the milk. When the dairy-maid turns and twists cream about in the churn, until butter collects in the midst of it—that butter is the fuel-substance, or fat, which was contained in the milk. The whey which is taken off from the cheese, or butter, is principally water; but if this water were steamed away by heat, there would remain behind a small quantity of fixed ash, which could not escape. This is the mineral-substance. Here then we have what we may term a specimen of Nature’s pattern-food. ”

“ Milk and cream undergo many changes after being incorporated in the finished butterine and the more cream there is in the product the lower the temperature in the tempering room should be. It is not at this stage that flavor is made. Only the flavor the product already contains is developed and many batches of sour or “off” butterine are traced to too warm tempering rooms, whereby the butter fat and oil because of their mixture with water decompose and become rancid.
FIG. 166.—MAKING BUTTERINE PRINTS.
Working. ”

“ Lucian Horace Ovid Virgil was back again in my apron pocket. I felt an immense amount of satisfaction feels.
Some days there is cream to be shaked into butter. The mamma does have me to make a handle go up and down a lot of times in the churn. This makes the butter come. When there is only a little cream to be shaked into butter, then the mamma has me to shake it to and fro in a glass jar. Sometimes it gets awfully heavy and my arms do get ache feels up and down. There are most ache feels when the butter is a long time in coming. ”

“ The two latter points exactly coincide with the practice in Africa. For higher classes, read old men. They use butter medicinally, and for that purpose keep it till it becomes rancid. The commentators, however, would amend Pliny by substituting minus for majus! The Roman naturalist in all he says refers to oiled butter or gee, and not to butter produced by agitation or churning. He is astonished that the barbarians possessing butter are ignorant of cheese; but is by no means surprised at his own countrymen, who, liking milk and cheese, could neither make butter nor adopt it. ”

“ When the kidneys are done, slip them off the skewer on to a hot dish, and place in each a piece of butter, à la maître d’hôtel, about the size of a small walnut; send to table, and by the time it reaches the guest, the butter will be half melted; quite so when the kidney is cut by the customer, who, by turning the pieces and blending the butter with the gravy, will make a rich sauce, and partake of a delicious as well as a wholesome dish. ”

“ Butter, in moderation, is nourishing, fattening, and wholesome. Moreover, butter tends to keep the bowels regular. These facts should be borne in mind, as some mothers foolishly keep their children from butter, declaring it to be too rich for their children's stomachs! New milk should be used in preference either to cream or to skim-milk. Cream, as a rule, is too rich for the delicate stomach of a child, and skim-milk is too poor when robbed of the butter which the cream contains. ”

“ From this diet of milk has sprung the invention of butter. In the Zahara the animals are milked once a-day. All the kinds of milk are poured in together, and the distribution is made round and round to a family in the same cup or bowl. This is the whole meal. [160] What remains over is left for the old men, and poured into a skin, and put on the camel’s back, that it may be given to them at the next encampment. On their arrival it is churned, and thus butter becomes their perquisite, and is forbidden fruit to the younger portion of the community. ”

“ When the pure butter-fat has been separated from the casein of milk it can be kept sweet and wholesome for a length of time sufficient to transport it, and to pass it through the various links in the chain of commerce, so that it can reach the family table a long distance from its source of production. This, in addition to man's instinctive relish for dairy products, makes butter the most popular fat in the diet of civilized man. ”

“ Butter is the clean, non-rancid product made by gathering in any manner the fat of fresh or ripened milk or cream into a mass, which also contains a small portion of the other milk constituents, with or without salt, and contains not less than eighty-two and five-tenths (82.5) percent of milk fat. By acts of Congress approved August 2, 1886, and May 9, 1902, butter may also contain added coloring matter. ”

“ So far as its food substances are concerned, butter is composed largely of fat, but it also contains water, protein in the form of casein, and mineral matter. The quantity of water contained in butter determines to a large extent the weight of butter, since water is heavier than fat ”

“ Bute spent nearly the whole winter and spring of 1870-1871 at his beautiful Scottish home, to which he was deeply attached. As he came to know his neighbours better—and he took much pains to cultivate friendly relations with them all—the stiffness, which was, perhaps, as much the result of his own shyness and reserve as of their lack of sympathy with his religious opinions, to a great extent wore off, and his simplicity, courtesy, good sense, and kindness of heart won for him little by little the high place in their regard which he ever afterwards maintained. ”

“ The common kinds of imitation butter, oleomargarine, butterine, etc., when properly made, agree very closely in chemical composition, digestibility, and nutritive value with butter from cow’s milk.
“2. In fulfilling one of the most important functions of food, namely, that of supplying the body with heat and muscular energy, they, with butter, excel in efficiency all, or nearly all, our other common food materials. ”

“ Then down into the stone-floored milk-room, where Aunt Abigail was working over butter, and where Betsy, swelling with pride, showed Aunt Frances how deftly and smoothly she could manipulate the wooden paddle and make rolls of butter that weighed within an ounce or two of a pound. ”

“ We here found concealed near the trunk of an old tree a case-bottle filled with excellent butter, which the rangers told me they made by melting and clarifying the fat of the palm-tree worms: this fully answers all the purposes of European butter, and I found it in fact even more delicious to my taste. The pistachio or pinda nuts they also convert into butter, by their oily substance, and frequently use them in their broths. The palm-tree wine they have always in plenty ”

“ To make it eat like fresh butter, dip each piece into water when it is cut out of the jar; or work it over again in fresh buttermilk or milk, and make it into shapes like fresh butter. It will eat much better with toast, than most of the fresh butter that is made in winter. It is a false idea, that butter, to be preserved for winter use, requires a greater quantity of salt: experience has proved the contrary. Butter salted in the common way, and put in pots with brine over the top, retains its flavour, and is better preserved than by an additional quantity of salt. ”

“ If children are brought up without the use of butter, or a butter substitute, they rapidly lose health and condition, and even in many savage races, we find that the fat of animals is consumed in large quantities, taking the place of the butter of more civilised countries. ”

“ To make Salt Butter fresh.—Put four pounds of salt butter into a churn, with four quarts of new milk, and a small portion of arnotto. Churn them together, and, in about an hour, take out the butter, and treat it exactly as fresh butter, by washing it in water, and adding the customary quantity of salt.
This is a singular experiment. The butter gains about three ounces in each pound, and is in every particular equal to fresh butter. ”

“ The quality of flavor and aroma in butter is, of course, also affected by other conditions, as, for instance, the presence or absence of salt, as well as the inherent qualities of the milk, that are controlled, to some extent at least, by the character of the feed which is consumed by the animal. ”

“ For provisions we generally rely on fresh mutton, to be fried in the pan or boiled in the 'billy,' bread, biscuits, rice, oatmeal, Liebig's Extract, chocolate, tea, and so on. A pound or two of fresh butter is always a boon, and a few tins of marmalade, whilst to some men onions supply the oft-felt want of a vegetable diet. ”

“ The butter is the constituent of milk which is most affected by the nature and amount of the animal's food; and butter is precisely the article which is of the greatest importance to the Irish dairy farmer, as the quantity of cheese prepared in this country is inconsiderable. ”

“ To us butter comes so naturally—it is so necessary—that we cannot imagine ourselves without it, nor call up the difficulties in the way of its first discovery, which is one of the latest of uncivilized articles among the barbarous.
We read of butter in ancient times, but it was gee. The merit of ours is its being made from cream thrown up cold. The milk of kine alone has that property; and that milk during many centuries was unknown to man as food.
The great event of primeval society was the employment of cattle in tillage. ”