Welcome to Story Hour!
Come join your friends at the Centralia Community Library for farm stories and learn how to make homemade butter. We will be sampling our creations on fresh bread so don’t miss this opportunity! Story time will begin at 10:30am on Saturday, January 17th. — Mrs. Houck
The Making of Homemade Butter
by Nancy Snider Meritt
Recently the story hour children at the Centralia Library were shown how to make homemade butter. Mrs. Houck used baby food jars and poured in whipping cream. The children shook the jars while they were read stories and presto! butter was made.
I had brought my glass butter churn with a wooden paddle inside the churn (passed down to me from my mother, Althea Morrison Snider, and the children also made butter in it by turning the handle. Most of the adults did not know that the liquid left from the mound of butter when it was made is called “buttermilk.” It tastes nothing like buttermilk bought in the store. We also made cottage cheese by placing milk in the enamel dish pan and letting it sour. When curds form they are squeezed out and this is “cottage cheese.” The liquid left is “whey” and we fed it to the pigs.
Butter churning is an old method passed down from generation to generation. Most likely a new bride would receive a butter churn for her dowry. Growing up on the farm, we would scoop out the cream from the cream can that had been separated from the milk in a separator. We first had a hand crank separator and when the REA (Rural Electric Association) brought electricity in 1950 to our farm we had a electric separator. The cream came out of one side and the milk another. The cream was sold to “the cream man” who came to the farm once a week. We usually had two cream cans full of cream. He sold butter from his truck also.
There was nothing compared to the rich taste of homemade butter on homemade bread (unlike the frozen kind in the store) with homemade wild plum, gooseberry, elderberry jelly or apple butter spread on top with a glass of homemade buttermilk!
We call those “The good ole days.”
