Pour some whipping cream into a jar and shake. Simple as that really.
Many of us have done this as kids.
But if you want to taste the butter that the settlers and pioneers ate you'll need to get out the salt.
The Dairy chapter of the 1881 Iowa Settlers Manual has instructions for making butter.
The only real difference between the two sets of instructions is the salt that the settlers are using to preserve their butter.
Even though we have refrigeration, salted butter still has its place today. Some people like it better. Some recipes require it. And salted butter will last four times longer in a refrigerator than unsalted. Two months versus two weeks.
But the amount of salt being used has changed quite radically since the 1800's.
The Iowa Settlers Manual recommends using one ounce of salt per pound of butter. That's six teaspoons of salt per pound.
Today's salted butter varies in salt content but as a rough guide it usually has between one and two teaspoons of salt per pound.
Does butter made the old way taste salty? Yes, to us it does.
But the way we taste salt works in a strange way. Nutritionists have known for a long time that we build up a taste-tolerance for salt driven by how much we consume on a daily basis. If we regularly eat a lot of salt, we don't really perceive the taste of it until we get close to our taste-tolerance level.
What we do notice immediately is the lack of salt. So we salt our food to the point that we can't sense its unsaltiness, rather than trying to achieve a flavor of saltiness.
Which means that while the settlers and pioneers used what we would consider to be very salty butter, it wouldn't have seemed as salty to them. They probably wouldn't have noticed it.
This is an interesting lesson to anyone trying to experience what life was like for these people. Context matters.
Anybody born within the last 100,000 years was 99.99% physically and mentally identical to us. Yet without having lived a whole life as them, even something as mundane as the taste of butter is not something that we can easily recapture.
But it's these differences that tell us about who we are. Learning about the people of the past gives us a sense of the journey we have taken to be here, the choices we have made, and what makes us special today. It informs our future choices.
Which is why preserving and promoting their knowledge and ways of doing things is as important as preserving their monuments and history.
You can visit the Pioneer Handbooks library for a collection of free downloadable how-to and DIY from the settlers and pioneers.
If you think their ways of doing things are worth preserving, then use the buttons below to like us on Facebook and send this historical how-to on a trip around the globe.
Yes I used to pour off the cream into a shaker to make butter. Never added salt though. These days we don't use butter or marge.
ReplyDeleteGood post.
Regards, Keith.
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Interesting how different people made butter. I was under the impression that everybody without refrigeration salted their butter. Not true! Mother let me know, under no uncertain terms, her parents never salted their butter. So, I have to assume that salted butter was considered inferior in her corner of Kansas. My mother was raised on a farm without electricity during the Thirties and her parents were born in the mid-1880s.
ReplyDeleteFor what it is worth, her folks stored butter and other perishables in a bucket they lowered into the cistern during the summers and they used a Daisy churn for butter making.
I'm really enjoying the information you are publishing. Thanks.
Thank you for the insight Judy. I'll bet I could have spoken with your mother for days on end without running out of discoveries. I think pioneer and settler food storage techniques will make a fine subject of a future post. I'll start hitting my books and see what I can find.
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