A stoneware churn is best, and a tin one is better than wood. Keep milk in a cool place, where air circulates freely; close air spoils milk and cream. Never stir milk after it is set, as it stops the rising of the cream. Skim milk as soon as it becomes loppard. Put a little ice in each pan in hot weather, and you get more cream. In skimming milk, do not scrape off the hardest portion that adheres to the pan, as it injures the butter. Put a spoonful of salt to each pailful of milk (except what is for family use), and it makes the butter sweeter, and come easier. Salt your cream as you gather it, and it keeps better, and makes sweeter butter. In hot weather churn in the coolest part of the day, and in a cool place, and do not shut the air out of the churn, as it is necessary to make the butter come. Butter is best, to work it enough the first time. Never work it three times. It will keep better to work out the buttermilk without putting in water. The more entirely it is freed from buttermilk, the longer it will keep sweet.
A good brine is made for butter by dissolving a quart of fine salt, a pound of loaf sugar, and a teaspoonful of saltpetre in two quarts of water, and then strain it on to the butter. Packed butter is most perfectly preserved sweet by setting the firkin into a larger firkin, and filling in with good brine, and covering it. Butter will keep sweet a year thus.
Buttermilk kept in potter’s ware dissolves the glazing, and becomes poisonous.
Never scald strainers or milky vessels till thoroughly washed, as the milk or cream put in them will be injured by it. The best way to scald such vessels is to plunge them all over into scalding water, and then every spot is scalded.
Butter will sometimes not come because the air is too much excluded from the churn.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
ARTICLES AND CONVENIENCES FOR THE SICK.
“In some maladies,” says Dr. Pereira, “as fevers and acute inflammatory diseases, an almost unlimited use of fluids is admitted, under the names of slops, thin diet, fever diet, broth diet, &c. They quench thirst, lessen the stimulating quality of the blood, increase its fluidity, and promote the actions of the secreting organs. They are sometimes useful, also, in lessening the irritating contents of the alimentary canal.”
“But in some maladies it is necessary to restrict the quantity of fluids taken, or, in other words, to employ a dry diet.”
As it is so customary for invalids to throng to watering places, the following remarks contain very important cautions.