FRESH BUTTER
The French use for table butter that which is freshly made and without salt. One soon learns to prefer it to the best salted butter. It is very easy to make fresh butter, but not always easy to buy it, for it keeps only a day at its best, and therefore the surest way of having it good is to make it. Take a half pint of double cream; turn it into a bowl, and with a wire whip beat it until the butter forms. This will take but a few minutes, if the cream is of the right temperature (65°). (If very cold, it will whip to froth as it is prepared for whipped cream.) Turn off the milk; add some ice water, and work the butter until it is firm and free from milk; then press it into pats, and keep it in a tight jar on the ice until ready to use.
This amount of cream, which costs ten cents, will, if rich, give a quarter of a pound of butter. Put some fresh grass or some clover blossoms in the jar with the butter, and it will absorb their flavor. (See illustration facing page [256].)
- 1. Shells made with No. 5.
- 2. Balls made with No. 7.
- 3. Small pats made with No. 6.
- 4. Rolls made with No. 7.
TO MAKE WHITE HARD SOAP
Save every scrap of fat each day; try out all that has accumulated, however small the quantity. This is done by placing the scraps in a frying-pan on the back of the range. If the heat is low, and the grease is not allowed to get hot enough to smoke or burn, there will be no odor from it. Turn the melted grease into lard-pails and keep them covered. When six pounds of fat have been obtained, turn it into a dish-pan; add a generous amount of hot water, and stand it on the range until the grease is entirely melted. Stir it well together; then stand it aside to cool. This is clarifying the grease. The clean grease will rise to the top, and when it has cooled can be taken off in a cake, and such impurities as have not settled in the water, can be scraped off the bottom of the cake of fat.
Put the clean grease into the dish-pan and melt it. Put a can of Babbitt’s lye in a lard-pail; add to it a quart of cold water, and stir it with a stick or wooden spoon until it is dissolved. It will get hot when the water is added; let it stand until it cools. Remove the melted grease from the fire, and pour in the lye slowly, stirring all the time. Add two tablespoonfuls of ammonia. Stir the mixture constantly for twenty minutes or half an hour, or until the soap begins to set.
Let it stand until perfectly hard; then cut it into square cakes. This makes a very good, white hard soap which will float on water. It is very little trouble to make, and will be found quite an economy in a household. Six pounds of grease make eight and a half pounds of soap.