Food from Animals
The dairy Butter and cheese can be made in the kitchen, but if you have a room or outhouse you don't know what to do with, it is well worth equipping it as a dairy. If possible the floor should be made of tiles, or concrete, with a drain. Install plenty of taps for hot and cold water, a large sink and draining boards made of spaced dowels.
BUTTER Butter is made by bashing cream about. But it will not work until the cream has "ripened": in other words, until lactic acid bacteria have converted some of the lactose, or milk sugar, into lactic acid. Commercially, cream is pasteurized to kill all bacteria, lactic acid included, and then inoculated with a pure culture of bacteria. We can't, and don't want to be, so scientific, but we make equally good butter by keeping our cream until the oldest of it is at least 24 hours old. It can be kept twice as long as this if everything is clean enough. We add more cream to it at every milking, at a temperature of more or less 68째F (20째 C). Then we make sure the last lot of cream has gone in at least twelve hours before we start churning it.
Dairy equipment 1 Cheese vat 2 In-churn cooler 3 Milk chum 4 Cheese press 5 Butter chum 6 Cream separator 7 Butter-worker 8 Vertical curd knife 9 Horizontal curd knife.
The best-known churn is simply a barrel in which the cream is turned over and over so it flops from one end to the other and bashes itself. But there are churns, like the blow churn, which have paddles that whirl round to beat the cream. You can make butter on a tiny scale by beating it with a wooden spoon or paddle, plunging a plunger up and down in a cylinder or using an egg-beater. Anything, in fact, which gives the cream a good bashing. If the cream is more or less at the right stage of acidity, and at the right temperature, it will "come", meaning suddenly turn into little butter globules, in as little as two or three minutes. If it hasn't come in ten minutes, take its temperature and if it is wrong bring it to 68째F (20째C). Then try again. 99