As Julia Child once said
with enough butter anything is good,
and that is especially true with fresh butter,
and so today I am going to hand churn some fresh butter.
So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as I dive in to butter
this time on Tasting History.
So I've been searching for an actual historic recipe
for making butter but they're really hard to find because
it seems like throughout most of history people just knew how to
make butter so nobody really wrote it down. It would just say make butter,
but I found some partial instructions in my favorite 17th century cookbook
'The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened'
and as if the name of the cookbook isn't fancy enough the name of the recipe sure is.
"My lord of Saint Alban's Creme Fouette. Put as
much as you please to make, of thick cream into a dish,
and whip it with a bundle of white hard rushes,
(of such as they make whisks to brush cloaks) tied together,
till it come to be very thick, and near a buttery substance.
If you whip it too long, it will become butter..."
So in his trying to tell you how not to make butter he inadvertently
tells you how to make butter, and that's really all that butter is,
it's whipped cream that got whipped too much until all the buttermilk fell out.
But there are a few more steps in making a proper butter.
Now there are many, many types of butter and one of the big delineators is the fat content.
You really need at least 36% fat but if you can find one with 40% fat or even more all the better.
Also here in America most of our milk and cream is pasteurized which makes
it so the flavor is just a little bit more bland,
so if you can find raw cream that is going to make the best butter.
Also try to find cream that has come from grass-fed cows because
it is going to have more beta-carotene in it
which is going to lead to a more yellow butter
rather than the pale white butter that you'll often find at stores.
Then the only other thing that you'll need is some way to churn it.
Now you can go the really old-fashioned way and use a plunger style butter churn,
and it will take you all afternoon,
or you could also use a stand mixer which will take you all of five minutes very modern
but kind of achieves the same thing,
but I am going to split the difference and use use one of these hand cranked
jars, butter churns. These were very popular in the 19th century,
it was a way to make less amount of butter so you're not making a huge
churn of butter, and it takes all of 15 minutes.
And I'll put a link in the description to where you can get one of these.
So first let your cream come to room temperature and then pour
it into the jar and screw the lid on, and get to churning.
And it really helps to pass the time if you have a good churning song like The Byrds
♪ this is my butter churn, churn ,churn. ♪
But regardless of your chosen soundtrack after
seven or eight minutes you should have something similar to whipped cream,
and that means that you are about halfway there,
so continue to churn the whipped cream for about one more song.
♪ Churn the cream around,
love to make that butter. ♪
And then almost in an instant it will become very difficult to churn anymore,
and that is when the buttermilk separates from the fat, the fat being the butter.
Pour out as much buttermilk as you possibly can and then put the butter into a bowl.
Now the goal here is to remove as much buttermilk from the butter as possible,
and it will make it last longer.
So the first way to do that is to wash the butter.
So pour very cold water over the butter and knead the butter while the water gets all murky.
And it is really important that it is ice cold water or else the butter will just melt.
Then remove that water and repeat the process with clean water for three or four times,
or until the water remains fairly clear even as you rinse it.
Then dry the butter in some tightly woven cheesecloth,
wringing out as much liquid as possible.
And again it's really important that it's very cold butter or else it just melts and goes through
the cheesecloth, and it turns out August in my house not the best weather for making butter,
so I ended up having to put it into the
refrigerator several times just to make it manageable,
and even then after like 10 seconds of working with it it would start to melt.
Yeah, make this during the winter.
The next step in getting even more buttermilk out is with paddles.
Basically you're going to squeeze the butter
together as more liquid comes out and you can use your hands for this,
but again your hands will make it melt. Even with the paddles mine was melted,
made an absolute mess. If it's cold it doesn't make that mess.
Either way push it into any shape that you like and it's ready to eat.
Now this is historically what is called sweet butter or fresh butter and it's ready to eat.
The problem is it really doesn't last very long,
four or five days tops before it starts to go rancid.
That's why throughout most of history salt
was added to the butter and it was added at this stage,
but for most of history it's not like salted butter today
where they add you know a little bit, just give it some flavor.
They would add a ton of salt, about 10 times the salt that is added today to be
used as a preservative, thereby making it rather unpalatable.
So when you did want to eat that super salted butter you would have
to follow in instructions like these from the 14th century 'Le Ménagier de Paris'
"To desalt butter, put it in a bowl on the fire to melt,
and the salt will fall to the bottom of the bowl,
This salt is good in potage. The remainder of the butter stays sweet.
Otherwise, put your salted butter into fresh water, knead it and pound it,
and the salt will stay in the water." I'm not adding enough salt to my butter
to preserve it but I might add just a little bit for flavoring but before I
do that let's talk about the history of this most important ingredient.
Butter has been around for a long time and while
we don't know exactly how it was invented there are some theories.
One is that somewhere in Central Asia some cream was put into a container of some sort
and kept on the saddle and while galloping along it churned the cream into butter.
But instead of butter from a cow it was more likely that it was butter from a yak or a camel,
both of which are still made today.
Further north reindeer milk was also common and supposedly great for making butter,
for while reindeer don't give much milk it's incredibly high in fat making for the best butter.
Now the earliest images we have of people churning butter comes from the Sumerian city of Ur.
It shows two men rocking a clay urn back and forth to churn the butter,
a process still used in some parts of the world today.
From there butter diverged mostly in how it was
preserved. The first and frankly more delicious way was to melt the butter,
and let the liquid separate rate from the milk
solids. Those milk solids then would go rancid less quickly,
and that is called ghee. This method was and is used today
in India as well as much of the Middle East and Africa,
and not only is it great for cooking but in
its purest form it is used in oil lamps or offered to Lord Krishna.
Now the other way to preserve butter was as I mentioned adding a lot of salt and that's the
way that most people in the northern climates of Asia and Europe did it,
and the Greeks and Romans talked about people from those areas eating a lot of butter.
The Greek poet Anaxandrides going so far as to dub the population of Thrace
baoutyrophagoi, or butter eaters. And Pliny the Elder say that butter is
"Held as the choicest food among barbarian tribes,
and one which distinguishes the wealthy from the multitude at large...
the more rank it is in smell, the more highly it is esteemed."
Now this rank or rancid butter wasn't really for eating but rather for for washing.
The physician Galen said that "People in many cold regions where they lack olive oil use butter for
washing themselves." And those living north of the Roman Empire were known to slick back their hair
with this rancid butter similar to pomade.
When visiting the Burgundian Court in the 4th Century Bishop Sidonis Apollinaris wrote that
"I am forced to listen to the barbarous German language and to applaud,
despite myself when a drunken Burgundian sings his head perfumed with rancid butter."
But even though the Romans mocked their Northern neighbors liberal use of butter
they did use it on occasion as well,
not for pomade or really for eating but for ointments, for burns, or
"In cases where a leech has been swallowed, butter is the usual remedy,
with vinegar heated with a red-hot iron.
Indeed, butter employed by itself is a good remedy for poisons, for where oil is not to be procured,
it is an excellent substitute for it. Used with honey,
butter heals injuries and inflicted by millipedes..."
And this honey and butter combination was very popular with the Franks though not as a solve
for millipedes. In the 6th Century Anthimus, a Byzantine physician who spent time at the Court of
the Franks wrote that the men there drank milk and ate butter and should that butter be unsalted and
"Pure and fresh with a little honey mixed in, lick it at intervals while laying down."
Yet today if I lie on the couch while licking a stick
of honey covered butter I would be judged harshly,
but we have reached that point in history where butter is now for the most part just for eating.
It became this staple of many cuisines especially in Northern Europe.
In Ireland butter was often preserved by storing it in peat bogs where it would slowly ferment,
and could stay good for years.
Even now 3,000 year old containers of
bog butter have been Unearthed and judged edible by scientists.
Though I don't think they've actually tried it.
Now whether or not it's bog butter or just just regular butter
the butter of Ireland has been famous for centuries and they have been proud of it
even when mocked by their English neighbors.
In the 1590s the English traveler Fynes Morrison said of the Irish that they would
"swallow whole lumps of filthy butter."
But historically most of anything that the English ever said about the Irish is a little suspect,
and even Fynes Morrison's own biographer who was rather charitable to him
admitted that "he had a sane charity for all men, except Turks and Irish priests."
But it wasn't just in Ireland because butter
was a staple of the average diet all over Medieval Europe.
Sometimes it was the super salted butter that had to be washed a few times just to make it edible
but sometimes it was the rather costly May butter which was made in May.
And this butter was so prized that it was often used as medicine.
It was also typically the yellowest butter of the year due to the beta-carotene rich fresh grass
that the cows had been feeding on over the previous month.
But it was so common in an ingredient during the Middle Ages that it wasn't just for people.
"If a sparrow hawk is so ill that it rejects food,
open its beak with two hands and push down its throat some fresh butter the size of
a fava bean. One or two hours later feed it some fresh meat still warm."
Though I wonder if sparrow hawks were allowed to eat butter during Lent because people were not.
The Catholic Church forbade the eating of butter during
that 40-day period of Lent leading up to Easter,
which was really bad when the majority of your fat came from butter.
Of course in Rome where the church was based
they had olive oil so giving up butter wasn't that big of a deal,
but most of Europe didn't manufacture olive oil so they had to import it from places like Rome.
How convenient.
Now if you did need to eat butter instead of olive oil you could...
but you still had to pay.
Records show that in the 13th century if you were to eat butter during Lent
you had to pay six denier which was about the price of a nice capon
which could be an entire week's wages for many workers.
So much money was brought in by these dispensations that they are said to
have paid for the 260 foot tower built at the Cathedral in Rouen in the 15th century
giving it the name The Butter Tower. [Tour de Beurre]
Now it's unlikely that the tower was actually built just using money from butter dispensations
but it doesn't mean that they weren't a big deal,
and that the Church was bringing in a lot of money from them.
In fact in 1520 Martin Luther who headed up the Reformation
wrote that "In Rome they make a mockery of fasting, while forcing
us to eat an oil that they themselves would not use to grease their shoes.
Then they sell us the right to eat the foods forbidden on fast days...
they think the eating of butter to be a worse sin than to lie, blaspheme, or to be unchaste."
Soon after this by popular demand the Catholic
Church relented and allowed the eating of butter during Lent.
And forever after that butter was a staple of French cuisine,
and indeed most of the cuisines of Northern Europe.
And by the 18th century both in Europe and in America
butter had become more than just a regular ingredient.
Writers talk of it as the way that they would talk of wine,
talking about terroir and the the food that the cows were eating,
and what type of cow was giving the best butter in any given year.
Jersey cows were said to give wonderfully creamy butter due to
the high fat content in their milk something that actually still holds true to this day.
And Guernsey cows tend to give a higher carotene content to
their milk which leads to a deep yellow butter.
"The Epping butter is most highly esteemed in London and its neighborhood, great part of it
is made from cows which feed during the summer months in Epping Forest, where the leaves and
shrubby plants are understood greatly to contribute tribute to its superior flavor.
Hmmm, yes, yes.
I'm getting hints of shrubby plants on the palate. Very, very nice.
Now this was also a time for innovation in butter.
No longer did you have to spend hours plunge churning butter every few days
when you could crank churn it with a tool like I used today.
Or better yet let the dog do it for you.
A number of dog-powered butter churns came on the market in the 19th century,
but whether you hand churned or dog churned your butter, the problem of
spoilage was still a main concern especially because butter had become so common in food.
It's why it was such a big deal when
Betty Botter bought some butter
but she said this butter is bitter.
If I put it in my batter it will make the batter bitter,
and it would make the batter bitter and that's the problem.
Butter was in everything! "A matter for despair is regards bad butter is,
that at the tables where it has used it stands sentinel at the door
to bar your way to every other kind of food.
You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread which fills your mouth with bitterness,
to your beef-steak, which proves virulent with the same poison;
you think to take refuge in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans,
and polluting the innocence of early peas...
Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself at the dessert;
but the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague.
You are ready to howl with despair and your misery is great upon you..." Indeed.
Now there were ways to battle this rancid butter like
adding "Darby's prophylactic fluid... cream
it thoroughly, then put the butter in a clean vessel."
But more than anything that just masked the odor
of the rancid butter, didn't actually make it not rancid.
It really wasn't until the advent of refrigeration that bad butter became
an occasional occurrence rather than an ongoing scourge at the dinner table.
And it's thanks to refrigeration that I can count on my unpasteurized butter to
last at least a few days
if I don't eat it all before then.
And here we are freshly churned butter.
Let me just slather it on there.
I'm sure it was a little bit softer, I had to put it into the refrigerator so it didn't uh
didn't go bad.
But should still taste good. Here we go.
Hm.
Is there anything better than butter and bread?
Just butter maybe.
It is sweeter.
There is a sweetness to it, they call it sweet butter.
There is a sweetness to it.
That- it's not like sugar sweet. It's just like-
I don't know it's more fresh than butter that you buy at the store.
It's closer to European style butter which is cultured butter so it has-
it has more bacteria. It has just this more interesting flavor and it's absolutely delicious,
rather than American butter which sometimes can be a little on the bland side.
This is good.
This would be really great to make into like an herb butter or something like that
so when you are mixing it with the paddles that's the time to add in either some salt,
or some herbs- chop up some thyme or parsley or rosemary or something-
add it all in, not too much but add it all in and you'll just have a wonderful herb butter.
So when I say make some butter you can either use a stand mixer, it'll take you no time.
There's no reason to go churning it- the plunge churner.
You don't have to do that. You can also use one of these
Really cool crank churns, makes you feel like you're doing more work because you are.
It's a little tiring, but it only takes 10 or 15 minutes and it's really easy.
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