Before the butter is packed the casks are properly cleaned and prepared, for which practice and experience are requisite.
Old butter-casks that have been previously used are cleaned of every particle of fat and dirt remaining in them, and scoured and washed out as carefully as possible, and are placed for several days in running water before they are used again. If no running water is at hand, quite clean pond or spring water is taken, and all impure water is carefully avoided. After they have lain in the water five or six days, they are carefully scoured out with good wood-ashes and sand, and again well rinsed. After several scourings and soakings, they are put into a kettle over a fire and carefully scalded; and then, when cold, again scoured and rinsed, for which the most judicious dairymen use milk instead of water, and they are then placed to dry in the air. They are fit for use only when everything has been done in the most careful manner.
But new butter-casks require still more particular and careful treatment before they can be filled with butter without fear of injury. They are got ready for packing in several different ways. Some dairymen let them lie in pure water a whole summer and winter long, and wash them out in lye, and then treat them just as they do those that have been used. Others, however, who give the new casks the preference over the old, but who cannot wait for the soaking in lye over summer and winter, treat them in the following manner: They prepare a lye of good American potash, which generally contains the most alkali, in a cask holding some three hundred quarts, taking a pound of potash to twenty pounds of water. For a cask of the size named fifteen pounds of potash are used, which is prepared by pouring boiling water upon it and stirring constantly, adding a little more water as the potash dissolves. With this lye, which will be about five degrees strong by Beaumé’s aërometer, the butter-barrels are entirely filled. The barrels stand two hours filled with lye, and are then emptied and exposed to the air to dry, without being scoured out with water or milk. The lye may be used again for other new barrels, even though a part of its strength may be gone. Potash is added, from time to time, to keep up the specified degree of strength. A solution of fifteen pounds of coarsely-powdered alum is prepared in about three hundred quarts of hot water, in a vessel as large as the lye-cask. The butter-barrels are also filled full of the solution of alum, and allowed to stand twenty-four hours. This alum solution must also be of five degrees strength by Beaumé’s scale, and it can be used over and over by adding more alum now and then. After emptying out the alum and lye, they are dried a day in the sun and air, and then rinsed out in fresh, pure water, when they can be used for packing butter without fear. Some add a little sulphate of iron or green copperas to the alum, when the solution is more powerful; yet the management of the butter-barrels is then more troublesome, and requires more experience. The effect of the copperas has also the disadvantage that it blackens the barrels, which, though it does not injure them, is not liked by the purchaser.
By this treatment the new butter-barrels are much more quickly and cheaply cleansed, and got ready for packing and transporting butter, than by the course pursued with old barrels. The barrels, treated as above, are not only quite water-tight, but the wood is stronger and more durable. By means of the potash-lye and the alum solution the tannin is taken from the oak-wood used in the barrels, which, if it remained, would give a disagreeable taste to the butter. The effect of the potash and alum upon the wood of the barrels is quite harmless, and does not impart the least unhealthy quality to the butter.
When the old or new barrels have been cleansed and prepared, in either of the ways indicated, suitably for packing the butter, the bottom of the barrel is evenly covered with salt. Then a layer of butter which has been thoroughly washed and salted is made, and another layer of salt, and so alternate layers of salt and butter till the barrel is full, when a little brine of salt and water is poured on top. The butter is now ready to be laid in the cellar, and thence to be sold and exported. When the dairy is not sufficiently large to fill a barrel each day, the butter of several churnings must be used, and the barrel filled from time to time as it stands in the cellar. In that case the upper layer of butter is left covered with salt, and the cover of the barrel is closed down tight. In most large dairies a barrel is generally filled at one churning, which is considered better for the quality of the butter. The butter is always packed in so firmly that no space is left unfilled.
In doing up butter for sale at home, or at a neighboring market, the lumps are worked into the form of half a sphere, and put into little bright-hooped boxes, made to fit into larger casks, which can be nicely covered and closed up, as seen in [Fig. 119], where the dairy-woman holds a box in her hand. The covered casks are also seen carefully nailed up.
Fig. 119.
The buyer who wishes to try the butter uses a long iron or steel borer, hollow inside, and furnished with a handle, as also seen in the cut. This not only enables him to test the quality but the uniformity of the butter in the cask.