Re: Interesting Vince

We DID make our own butter, yes. My dad was particularly picky and didn't like the commercial butter so we always made our own.

Interesting thing about making butter is that the cream needs to age for about a day. Fresh cream just won't turn into butter. HOWEVER, the cream doesn't need to be sour either, in order to make butter out of it; just give it about a day in a cool environment. (This always ticks me off about bought buttermilk: they always sour it. Fresh sweet buttermilk is absolutely delightful but the bought buttermilk is awful).

So, the way WE made butter was to put it into a gallon container, (a Rogers Golden Syrup can, which was pretty much the same as a gallon of paint can today), put the lid on it nice and tight and then shake it. We only filled the can to about 3/4 full so that it could be shaken well.

The cream quite quickly turns into thick whipping cream inside and doesn't want to shake anymore. At this point we would knock it back and forth from one knee to the other and after maybe 10 minutes, it would start to make a swishy sound inside. We kept doing it until the container sounded as though it was full of milk (which it was: full of butter milk).

Then we opened the can and poured the contents through a strainer so that it caught all the lumps and lumplets. We pressed the lumps together and squished them good to get all the remaining buttermilk out of them and then put it all into cold water and continued to squish to "rinse" all the buttermilk out of the butter. Then we salted it, kneeded it and then formed it into blocks of butter. If I remember correctly, 3/4 gallons of cream produced about 1.5 lb of butter.

In later years we used a MixMaster instead of the shake method. It sure was a lot easier. If only we'd been able to get ahold of a paint shaker ... that would have been the absolutely best system!!

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I think you're probably about 9 years older than me.

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As for Beloved's email address ........ I don't think I have it anymore. Marge might still have it. We sort of had a falling out and I found it kind of pointless continuing email with him because he seemed intent on doing little but telling me how foolish I was. I just got tired of it.

-Vince