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Preserve

To Preserve Butter for Winter, the Best Way

A method for preserving butter by mixing it with salt, sugar, and saltpeter and cooling it in pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Preserve Butter for Winter, the Best Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cure

  1. Blend the salt, sugar, and saltpeter together well.

Mix and pack the butter

  1. Mix 1 ounce of this mixture with 16 ounces of butter until well combined.

  2. Press the mixture into pans that hold 10 to 12 pounds each.

Finish and cover

  1. Once the butter cools, sprinkle some salt on top.

  2. If the salt turns to brine and does not cover the butter, add strong salt and water.

  3. Cover the pans to protect from dust.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Preserves the butter by drawing out moisture and inhibiting microbial growth.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the salt's sharpness in the cured butter.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the butter and keeps its color by inhibiting spoilage.
Butter
Forms the fat base that the cure is worked into and packed.

The step that matters

Keeping the salt covered by brine. Salt must stay in contact with the butter surface so the brine layer protects it from air and microbes. If the salt dissolves and no longer covers the butter, the surface can spoil, so the record calls for adding strong salt and water.

“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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