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Dessert

Yellow Butter

A butter made by reducing milk, mixing with buttermilk, and churning with cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and buttermilk work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Yellow Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Boil the morning's milk slowly until reduced by one-fourth, stirring constantly.

  2. Cool the milk until cold in warm weather or leave lukewarm in cold weather.

  3. Cover the milk with a cloth tied over the vessel until afternoon.

  4. Repeat the process with the evening milk and mix both together.

Churn the butter

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of morning's buttermilk to the mixture.

  2. Churn the mixture in the morning, adding cold water as needed while churning.

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 + buttermilktop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides the fat and protein that separate into butter when churned.
Buttermilk
Adds live cultures that sour and thicken the milk before churning.

The step that matters

Churning with cold water. Adding cold water as needed while churning helps the fat globules clump together into butter. Water that is too warm can soften the fat so it will not gather properly.

“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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