Name: Butter, to Color
Ingredients: 1 lump of annatto (size of a hickory nut); 1 cup of water; 1 tablespoon of annatto solution (for 5 pounds of cream)

Butter, to Color

Ingredients

1 lump of annatto (size of a hickory nut)
1 cup of water
1 tablespoon of annatto solution (for 5 pounds of cream)

Directions

Make the colouring

Dissolve the annatto in a cup of water.

Colour the cream

Stir the solution into the cream in the churn.
Use 1 tablespoon of the solution to color 5 pounds of cream.

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

What each ingredient does

Annatto: Provides the yellow-orange colour that tints the butter.
Cream: Is the fat that becomes the butter and takes on the colour as it is churned.

“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.