Butter

the fatty portion of milk. Freshly churned butter contains about 85 per cent of fat and 11 per cent of water. The remaining 4 per cent consists of curd, animal salt, a trace of sugar, etc. Historically, butter from the milk of the cow is quite modern. The first butter was made from the milk of the goat, reindeer, camel, and yak. A large part of the world has never seen butter of any kind. A very small portion is familiar with the butter made from the milk of the cow.

Homemade or diary butter is produced by first setting the milk to cool in crocks or pans. The fat of milk is contained in small, oily globules much lighter than water. When milk stands, the heavier portion settles to the bottom of the pan, causing these globules of fat to rise to the surface where they may be skimmed off in the form of cream. Under the setting or gravity system it is claimed that from one per cent to one-half per cent of the cream remains in the skim milk of shallow pans, but that with cans twelve or eighteen inches deep, set in cool water, the remainder may be decreased to one-fifth per cent, or a loss of but three ounces to 100 pounds of butter.

The ancients churned the cream of goats by shaking it in sacks. Sometimes the sack was swung like a hammock. The Armenian dairymaid still hangs her goat-skin churn by cords beneath a tripod and swings it to and fro by hand. A small amount of butter may be made by whipping with a spoon. The old-fashioned churn, with a dasher raised up and down by a handle, is still fresh in memory. Modern churns consist of a series of paddles on a common axis caused to rotate by means of a crank. The principle is the same in all churns. By agitation of the cream, the fatty globules are jounced together and made to cohere. Churning should cease as soon as the butter collects into grains the size of wheat. It may then be taken from the buttermilk, worked with a paddle, and salted to taste. Working drives out the remnant of buttermilk, but care should be taken not to destroy the grain of the butter and make it greasy.

Dairy methods have changed greatly within the past twenty-five years. Creameries or factories now make about one-third of the total amount of butter produced in the United States. The cream is obtained from the milk by a separator consisting essentially of a series of tubes, centering like the spokes of a wheel in a central cavity. The machine is filled with milk and rotated with great rapidity. The heavier parts of the milk are driven by centrifugal force toward the outside of the machine, forcing the lighter oily globules into the center, whence they are drawn out and sent to the butter worker. A good separator will lose less than two ounces of butter out of one hundred pounds. Creamery butter, like factory cheese, is produced with economy, and under proper management is uniformly of high class.

The quality of butter is dependent, of course, at all seasons, on the quality of food consumed by the cow. Some wild plants, particularly the wild leek, render milk and butter unfit for use. Clover and bran stimulate the flow of milk and yield excellent results in butter. The last United States census gives the yield of butter made on farms at 1,071,745,127 pounds, and the yield of creamery butter at 420,954,016 pounds, making an annual total of very nearly 1,500,000,000 pounds of butter. Dairy or homemade butter is usually sent to market in prints; creamery butter in wooden firkins, or jars, or in pound bricks wrapped in oiled paper. America exports about 25,000,000 pounds annually. Denmark exports butter to the value of $35,000,000 each year. It is out of the question to estimate the quantity of butter made in the world. The butter-selling countries and the number of pounds exported by each in 1908 were:

Total . . . . . 634,891,165

In the same year the butter-buying countries and the number of pounds imported were:

Total . . . . . 639,414,277

See Cheese; Cattle; Adulteration