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To Make Butter

This recipe describes how to churn milk into butter and preserve it with a pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Prepare the equipment

  1. Keep your churn, pails, and pans clean by scalding and exposing them to the sun.

  2. Warm the pans and churns with hot water in winter.

  3. Cool the pans and churns with cold water in summer.

Make the butter

  1. Strain the milk into the pans after letting it stand for 10 minutes.

  2. Skim the milk as soon as it thickens in warm weather.

  3. In colder weather, skim when there is thick cream.

  4. Churn at least once a week, preferably every third day.

  5. If the cream froths, add a little salt.

  6. Work out all the buttermilk with a ladle in summer.

  7. Use clean hands in winter.

Store with pickle

  1. To store, place the butter in a jar or firkin, layering it cleanly and leaving space for pickle.

  2. Prepare the pickle with ½ pail of water, 1 quart of fine salt, 2 ounces of loaf sugar, and 1 ounce of saltpetre, boiled and skimmed.

  3. Once cold, cover the butter with the pickle to keep it fresh for a year.

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
Forms the cream that is churned into butter, and its buttermilk is worked out of the finished butter.
Fine salt
Preserves the butter in the pickle and seasons it, slowing spoilage.
Loaf sugar
Adds a little sweetness to the brine used in the pickle.

The step that matters

Working out the buttermilk. Buttermilk left in the butter lets it spoil quickly, so it must be thoroughly worked out before storing. Milk solids and liquid left behind can sour the butter.

“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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