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Dessert

To Make Butter

A method for making butter from milk, salt, sugar, and optional saltpetre.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Separate the cream

  1. Scald the milk in pans daily.

  2. Let the milk stand for 24 hours.

  3. Skim off the cream into a large covered jar.

  4. Stir the cream daily to prevent a skin from forming.

  5. Strain the cream into a churn and cover the churn.

Churn and wash

  1. In warm weather, move the churn handle slowly to avoid soft butter.

  2. When the handle is difficult to turn, the butter is ready.

  3. Remove the butter with a wooden ladle and squeeze out excess milk.

  4. Add a little salt and work the salt into the butter.

  5. Let the butter sit in a cool place for 3 hours.

  6. Work the butter again.

  7. Wash the butter in cold water.

  8. Store the butter.

Cure and pack

  1. For curing, mix 4 ounces of salt, 2 ounces of loaf sugar, and ¼ ounce of saltpetre.

  2. Work this mixture into the butter.

  3. Pack the butter in jars or tubs.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Its butterfat rises as cream, which is churned into the butter.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to the curing mixture worked into the butter.

The step that matters

Churning in warm weather. Warm cream makes soft butter because the fat stays too liquid to gather firmly. Churning slowly keeps the fat cool enough to clump into firm butter, and stopping when the handle becomes hard to turn marks the point where the fat has come together.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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