Homemade Butter

One of the hallway displays in the Benton County Historical Society's Corvallis Museum contains a number of old food-preparation items. Some, like the toaster, are earlier version of appliances you would find in most kitchens today.  But there is one item that you may not recognize and are unlikely to find in kitchens today.

 

This square wooden box is a butter mold. Until about 1900, most butter was made by individuals in their own home.  Some made more than they could use and traded it to their neighbors for other commodities.

To make butter, fresh milk was put in a shallow dish to settle and then the cream was skimmed off and placed in a churn.

Inside the churn was a dasher. 

Moving the dasher up and down caused the particles of fat in the cream to come together to make small globs of butter. Later, this was down by rotating a barrel churn or turning a crank to rotate the paddle in a smaller tabletop paddle churn.

Horner Museum Curator Thyrza Anderson, 1972-1977,  shown with butter churn

Gear driven tabletop glass Dazey butter churn

              

The liquid portion (buttermilk) was poured off through a hole in the top of the churn and then the small globs of butter were put in a butter-working bowl. 

The contents were kneaded by hand or worked with wooden butter paddles to squeeze out any additional liquid and to make the butter smoother.  

 

The bowl and paddle pictured were used by the Clarence Tedrow family on their farm along the Luckiamute south of Monmouth from 1900 to 1920.

Once the butter had reached the desired consistency, it was packed into a mold such as the one on display and chilled.

As some people with ample supplies of milk made extra butter to trade, they began to press designs into their blocks of butter as a type of trademark.  This butter mold has a acorn and leaf design.

Beginning in the late 1860s and accelerating after the invention of a mechanical cream separator in 1871, more and more butter was made in factories, not on individual farms. 

You could make your own butter by putting cream in a bowl and “churning” it with an electric mixer.  You first get whipped cream but if you keep going, eventually you'll have butter. I vaguely remember doing this as a child. But buying it is so much easier.

 By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon