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Chuck Hinman. IJMA No. 131 : Where Does Butter Come From? II It's Just Me Again. No. 131. Where Does Butter Come From? Part II received this version 15 October 2010 The next earlier Chuck Hinman story: Where Does Butter Come From Part 1Is Chuck Hinman your favorite Sunday with CM columnist, as many tell us? If so, we hope you'll drop him a line by email. Reader comments to CM are appreciated, as are emails directly to Mr. Hinman at: charles.hinman@sbcglobal.net By Chuck Hinman In Part 1, we had finished milking and had a ten-gallon can of milk for our efforts. We are entering the vestibule of our house where the cream separator is located. Mom had washed every "jot and title" of the separator in her morning chores including the twenty aluminum cones which were kept in order on their own hangar. The separator was assembled, clean, and ready to do business. "Thanks Mom! Keep up the good work and we may put you on steady washing the udders of the cows. It doesn't pay much but you can work up to 'head milker' and all the milk you can drink goes with that job. Just kidding Mom. Your expertise is in the kitchen. What's for sup?" She stuck her tongue out at me and playfully kicked me with her right leg behind her left. The cream separator was a marvel in the early 1930's. If you didn't have one, you waited overnight for the cream to rise on top the milk where you could "skim it off" for it's various household uses. Since pasteurization of milk, there are a lot of people who have never seen cream gather on top of milk. The separator was so heavy it was anchored to the floor. It was steel and stood five-foot high. When assembled it looked like a robot. Ours, a DeLaValle was operated by a crank. This is the way I, as a twelve year old boy remembers how it worked. I poured milk from the ten-gallon can of milk into the five-gallon aluminum bowl on the top of the separator. I started cranking the separator which until you got it going offered considerable resistance. When it was revved up and making a whining noise, I opened the spigot on the bottom of the bowl. The milk came down over a float and entered the machine over the twenty aluminum cones out of sight but rotating at high speed. A small stream of cream came out a tube and collected in a pan and the skim milk came out a similar tube in a much larger stream and collected in the ten-gallon milk can to be fed to the pigs. The cream that wasn't needed for household use was combined with the morning cream production and picked up on the daily route of the Kansas creamery. Whenever we were close to running out of butter, it was time to haul out the churn and make a new batch. Oleo was so gross, that white stuff, that people added that orange colored "gook"! Our churn was wooden and U-shaped. It was large and held five gallon of cream. We used two gallon of cream at one churning. The churn was operated with a wheel crank. That turned a wooden paddle near the bottom of the tub. The paddle had holes in it. The churn was three foot high and two foot wide. It had four legs and was attractive. The wood was varnished so it could pass for a piece of furniture. It had a removable plug on one end of the churn near the bottom so you could empty and clean the churn easily. I can't emphasize too much how tricky it was to get butter to firm in the process. I have seen Mom exasperated and sweating (pardon me -- perspiring) profusely when, after an hour of churning, there wasn't a sign of butter pieces floating in the cream. It had to do with the temperature of the cream. It needed to be more to the chilly side than room temperature. It was much easier to churn butter in the winter than in the summer. In the days before we had a refrigerator (REA was not in existence) Mom add a couple pieces of ice chipped off the block in the ice box -- to make the butter come. It never entered her mind to throw the whole mess out and drag out and eat oleo and forget good old home-churned butter! But on the umpteenth time she lifted the lid of the churn to see what was going on -- Hallelujah! There were golden specks of butter on the wooden paddles. We began to churn faster knowing that butter was just around the corner. Eventually those little specks of butter would collect on each other and you would have several balls of butter the size of baseballs. The churning was stopped. The rest of the procedure was Mom's alone. She gathered the chunks of butter in a large crockery bowl and took them to the kitchen. We had a hand carved wooden butter paddle that had seen much use in several generations of the Hinman family. Mom used the paddle to work the liquid out of the butter. It was kind of like kneading bread. Eventually she had a ball of pure butter that had started out as milk from the Hinman short-horn cows. Mom had several butter molds to "fancy-up" the butter, before it went on some fluffy butter-milk biscuits as only Mom, Merle Mouser Hinman (1893-1973) could make. Pass the butter, please! Written by Chuck Hinman, January 3, 2008. Chuck Hinman, 88 year old former Nebraska farm boy spent his working days with Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Houston, Texas. He lives at Tallgrass Estates in Bartlesville where he keeps busy writing his memories. Chuck is visually impaired. His hobbies are writing, playing the organ, and playing bridge. This story was posted on 2010-10-31 01:32:29
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Chuck Hinman: Where Does Butter Come From? Part 1 Chuck Hinman No. 112: The Watermelon Patch Chuck Hinman IJMA No. 035: Divorce - Is It the Only Solution? Chuck Hinman IJMA 099: Help for Visually Impaired Dummy Chuck Hinman: IJMA No. 075: Properly Dressed Chuck Hinman IJMA No. 106: Sleeping Bag Predicament Chuck Hinman IJMA No. 119: Beta Beta Beta : the Black Bottom Boys Chuck Hinman IJMA No. 162: A Tribute to Our Horses Chuck Hinman. IJMA No. 016: Twenty froggies went to school Chuck Hinman IJMA No. 092: Borrowing Stuff View even more articles in topic Chuck Hinman - Reminiscences |
 
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