Buttery

“ A matter for despair as regards bad butter is that at the tables where it is used it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread, which fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beefsteak, which proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting the innocence of early peas,—it is in the corn, in the succotash, in the squash,—the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them. ”

“ Butt′ercup, a plant of the Crowfoot genus, with a cup-like flower of a golden yellow; Butt′er-fing′ers, one who lets a cricket-ball he ought to catch slip through his fingers; Butt′er-fish (see Gunnel) ; Butt′erfly, the name of an extensive group of beautiful winged insects: (fig.) a light-headed person.—adj. light, flighty, like a butterfly.—ns. Butt′erine, an artificial fatty compound sold as a substitute for butter—since 1887 only allowed to be sold under the names margarine or oleo-margarine; Butt′er-milk, the milk that remains after the butter has been separated from the cream by churning ”

“ That it exists in no other substance than butter made from milk, and it is introduced to oleomargarine butter by adding to oleomargarine stock some milk, cream, or butter, and churning, and that when this is done it has all the elements of natural butter, but there must always be a smaller percentage of butterine in the manufactured product than in the butter made from milk. The only effect of the butterine is to give flavor to the butter, having nothing to do with its wholesomeness. ”

“ I never saw a little girl yet who didn’t like to watch butter-making. Don’t you love to run the butter-worker over it? I do, myself, for all I’m seventy-two!”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Elizabeth Ann. “I don’t know what you make butter out of. We always bought ours.”
“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” said Aunt Abigail. She turned and called across the room, “Henry, did you ever! Here’s Betsy saying she don’t know what we make butter out of! She actually never saw anybody making butter!” ”

“ I say, real yellow country butter, yellow that tells the cows feed on buttercups. That butter is the primest thing on earth."
"I'll tell you what I like," said another girl, thrusting her way to the fire. "Let me have toasting-fork and brown a bit of bread on both sides and while it is hot, clap on a lot of butter and let it melt in."
"Buttered toast is good," said Margaret Pointon. "But it don't do credit to butter. You must eat butter cold. Once melted, then the nature is gone from it for ever."
"Then you must have plenty of it," threw in Polly. ”

“ Only at nursery tea-tables, perhaps, was the warning ever heeded "Now, then! Waste not, want not!"
We have paid for our extravagant waste of other things besides butter....
And nowadays perhaps more interest is taken in the process that produces such butter as is allowed to us. As carefully as one who grades yellow amethysts I tipped up the churn, let the butter-milk run out into the appointed crock, and washed, with cold spring water, every granule of my precious butter off the lid of the churn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the butter is not good enough to eat on the surface of cold bread or on warm cakes, it is not good enough to eat in the inside of sweet cakes, or in pastry, or in any thing else; and is totally unfit to be mixed with vegetables or sauces. The use of butter is to make things taste well; if it makes them taste ill, let it be entirely omitted: for bad butter is not only unpalatable, but unwholesome. There are houses in which the money wasted on one useless bauble for the drawing-room would furnish the family with excellent fresh butter for a whole year—enough for all purposes. ”

“ Presently the “butler” informs you that your breakfast, a spatchcock, or a curry with eggs, and a plateful of unleavened wafers, called aps—bread being unprocurable hereabouts—is awaiting you. You find a few guavas or plantains, intended to act as butter, and when you demand the reason, your domestic replies at once, that he searched every house in the village, but could procure none. You might as well adopt some line of conduct likely to discourage him from further attempts upon your credulity, otherwise you will starve before the journey’s end. ”

“ It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter, and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Spread a linen cloth in a large bason, pour in the cream, tie it up like a pudding, fold another cloth over it, and bury it in a hole two feet deep, in light earth, put all the earth lightly in, lay a turf on the top, and leave it twenty-four hours; take it up, and it will be found in the state that butter is when it is just come. The buttermilk is lost, but this method answers very well in hot weather. ”

“ The farmer with whom we have talked said he was about determined to send his milk to the creamery, since butter-making made it so hard for the women. Surely woman is less a drudge than she used to be. If, after being relieved from the labor of churning, the remaining working of the butter is considered too hard for the farmer's wife, the day of a woman's redemption must be near at hand. ”

“ These varieties, I presume, come from the practice of churning only at long intervals, and keeping the cream meanwhile in unventilated cellars or dairies, the air of which is loaded with the effluvia of vegetable substances. No domestic articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence the infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has late in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding one which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table. ”

“ Ladybug set out to find Betsy Butterfly again. But meeting Daddy Longlegs near the stone wall, she stopped to gossip withp. 44 him, telling him how she had learned that she liked butter, and explaining that she had not yet tasted any.
"So you looked into a buttercup to find out, eh?" said Daddy Longlegs. "I'll have to do that, myself. Maybe I've always liked butter, too, without knowing that I do."
"You can't tell till you try," Mrs. Ladybug remarked. "But you mustn't be too sure. You may be disappointed. There's Betsy Butterfly! She doesn't care for butter at all." ”

“ BAD BUTTER. OF all the needless discomforts common to boarding-houses and hotels, we know of none so truly inexcusable, nor which subtracts more from one’s enjoyment, than the use of bad butter for cooking purposes. When placed on the table in the butter-dish, if found to be imperfect or quite unpalatable the butter can easily be rejected. To eat good bread without butter, or, if the bread is unsatisfactory, a fine mealy potato with a little salt, is by no means the greatest hardship that you may be subjected to. ”

“ The old khan-jee proves himself a thoughtful, considerate landlord, for as I eat he busies himself picking the most glaringly conspicuous hairs out of my butter with the point of his dagger. One is usually somewhat squeamish regarding hirsute butter, but all such little refinements of civilized life as hairless butter or strained milk have to be winked at to a greater or less extent in Asiatic travelling, especially when depending solely on what happens to turn up from one meal to another. ”

“ Like the best butter of France and England, it is sweet and pure, like solidified cream, and as different as can be from the hard, salty mass which most generally passes 237 for butter among us. The buttermilk of a daily churning is also sweet and rich, a delicious nourishing drink, and an excellent adjuvant in the making of various cakes and other household delicacies. ”

“ Auspicious is the aspect of Vadhryasva's fire good is its guidance, pleasant are its visitings. When first the people Of Sumitra kindle it, with butter poured thereon it crackles and shines bright. 2. Butter is that which makes Vadhryaiva's fire growstrong: the butter is its food, the butter makes it fat. It spreads abroad when butter hath been offered it, and balmed with streams of butter shines forth like the Sun. ”

“ Nothing whatever, I swear to you. A mite of butter on my bread.”
“You are a novice, my good woman. A mite of butter on your bread. You are mistaken; you ought to have said: a mite of butter on the rabbit. By G—, your butter smells good! It is special butter, extra good butter, butter fit for a wedding; certainly, not household butter!”
The gendarme was shaking with laughter, and repeated:
“Not household butter certainly.”
As Brigadier Senateur was a joker, all the gendarmes had grown facetious, and the officer continued:
“Where is your butter?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ FLAVOR IN BUTTER.
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 butterfly, especially a large butterfly, rarely bothers with these low-growing herbs, though each has its own delicious fragrance—and a butterfly’s scent is keen. So my black white admiral alternately danced and soared on down through the richly perfumed areas of the wood while I plunged eagerly after, glissading the needle-carpeted slope, making station from trunk to trunk lest a too headlong flight plunge me to oblivion in what I knew was at the foot of the hill. ”

“ Ladybug. And again she said, "No!" in a very decided manner. "We've come to warn you that we've found out about your trickery," she announced. "We know that you like butter, and thatp. 55 you're in the habit of taking it from Farmer Green—yes! and eggs, too!"
"Why, I don't know what you're talking about!" Betsy Butterfly faltered. She was really greatly surprised.
"It won't help you to be untruthful," Mrs. Ladybug told her severely. "It's no wonder—" she added—"it's no wonder Mrs. Green wouldn't give me a bit of butter when I went to the farmhouse yesterday. ”

“ Should you desire to get on the good side of a lady, just give a broad, sweeping, slathering compliment to her butter. It beats kissing the dirty-faced baby; it beats anything. Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon the butter, be it good, bad, or indifferent to your notions of things, but to her, her butter is always good, superior, excellent. ”

“ Although the adulterations of this staple article of food are numerous, the main cause of the quantities of bad butter with which the community is burdened, is ignorance of the true methods, and slovenliness in the preparation of this staple article, for which no reasonable excuse can be urged. In the making of good butter, no process is more simple or easily accomplished. ”

“ There is, it is true, an article of butter made in the American style with salt, which, in its own kind and way, has a merit not inferior to that of England and France. Many prefer it, and it certainly takes a rank equally respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and worked so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it might make the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but salted with care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether even a fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to the white, creamy freshness of his own. ”