The unwillingness of Americans to take pains in the preparation of foods to which I have referred as one of the main indications of our being an ungastronomic nation is strikingly illustrated in the department of butter-making, wherein it is the chief cause of our inferiority.
Our Government has done its best to enlighten the butter-makers. In 1904 the Department of Agriculture published, for free distribution, Farmers' Bulletin No. 241: "Butter-making on the Farm," by Edwin H. Webster, Chief of Dairy Division, Bureau of Animal Industry; and, in 1905, Circular No. 56 of the same Bureau: "Facts Concerning the History, Commerce and Manufacture of Butter," by Harry Hayward, assistant chief. These pamphlets contain in concise form invaluable information which, if generally utilized, would revolutionize the butter business.
Mr. Webster refers to "the great amount of poor butter made on the farm," and Mr. Hayward also confesses that "a very small percentage of all dairy butter made is of really high grade."
When one reads of all the diverse precautions that must be taken to ensure a good article, and bears in mind the characteristically American unwillingness to take pains with the things that are put into our stomachs, one wonders not that our butter is so inferior.
A few of the hundred-and-one precautions necessary to secure a first-class article may be briefly mentioned. The cow must be kept carefully cleaned, particularly the udder, and so must the hands of the milker, and the pail which holds the milk. "The habit of some milkers of wetting their hands with milk just as they begin is a filthy practice and the cause of much bad milk and poor butter." There must be no hidden, inaccessible places in the pails, nor must rusty tinware be used, because it imparts a metallic flavor to the milk. Some of the so-called washing powders are very objectionable. The walls of the barn must be whitewashed, and the ventilation such that the air is changed every few minutes. The pails must be rinsed first with cold, then with boiling water. The milk must be removed as soon as possible from the barn, where it readily absorbs dust or bad odors from the air, and then stored in a cold place, far away from decaying vegetables or fruits or other things, the odors of which it might absorb. The sun should pervade the cold storage room but not look on the milk. If possible, the cream should be collected by means of a separator, for the proper handling of which there are a number of rules, the neglect of any one of which will spoil the butter. It is absolutely necessary to cool the cream thoroughly, immediately after separating, and to avoid mixing of cold with warm cream. Then there are a number of directions concerning churning; working the butter to get out the milk and water; packing; marketing; feeding the cows, and so on, none of which can be disregarded with impunity.
This complexity of the art of butter-making may help to explain the situation in America, but does not excuse it, for in the gastronomic countries of Europe people are not too lazy, ignorant, or indifferent to turn out a first-class article every day in the year.
What I wish to call particular attention to is that all these precautions necessary for the making of first-class butter relate to its Flavor. Persons buying butter for any other purpose than the enjoyment of its Flavor are extremely foolish, for they can get the same amount of fat and general nourishment very much cheaper in a hundred other ways.
It is for the sake of securing an agreeable aroma or Flavor that all the rules just enumerated, and two-score more, must be observed. If this is not done—if only one or two of them are neglected—there are developed in the milk, or the cream, or the churned butter, bacteria of a very disagreeable kind, which will convert butter that might have been of the highest grade into a second, third, or fourth grade article, or one quite unfit for human consumption, because of excessively rancid, fishy, smoky, tallowy, leeky, soapy, cheesy, or other flavors. The art of butter-making consists in eliminating all disagreeable flavors and fostering the agreeable ones.
Renovated or process butter is made of butter in which, on account of careless manufacture or storing, the disagreeable bacteria have so got the upper hand of the agreeable ones that even those persons who, because of a slender purse or an imperfectly developed sense of smell, are contented with fourth-grade butter, refuse to buy it. This stuff (often sold, horribile dictu, as "cooking butter") is subjected to a process of purification, which makes it a wholesome and nutritious article of diet. Yet it is sold at a much lower price, for the reason that it is inferior in Flavor to good butter.
The long and fierce fight between the butter-makers and the manufacturers of oleomargarine is also in the final analysis, a question of Flavor.