SC -Making Butter in Period

[WOLFMOMSCA@aol.com]

There is a lot of info about butter in the dairy-prod-msg file in my Florilegium,
although not a specific answer to the question asked on churning butter. The
following two messages are excerpted from this file.

Anne-Marie, did you ever decide whether that was a butter churn in the picture
you were describing in the second message?

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net

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From: troy at asan.com (Philip W. Troy)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 10:05:49 -0400

In article <5t15cg$22e$1 at gatekeeeper.teledanmark.dk>, mjbr at tdk.dk (Michael
Bradford) wrote:

> As I remember, cream can be separated from milk by letting the milk
> stand and after a while, skimming the cream off.
> 
> When the cream is churned, it is beaten by the motion of the paddlle.
> Last year for a seminar on cooking in the viking period (which my
> group were teaching), we took cream and whipped it in a bowl with a
> bundle of twigs (which we had bought at an old building museum and
> were sold for this purpose) and after a while, you have butter. Just
> add a little salt for taste.

I remember reading somewhere that the plunger-style butter churn is of
comparatively recent development. Somewhere (I'll have to go through a
stack of papers to find it) I have a photocopy of [a facsimile edition of]
a 16th-century English dairy manual. IIRC, it describes a process where
the dairymaid pours milk into shallow bowls, allows the cream to rise, and
beats it with her hands, gathering up lumps of butter as they form,
pushing it together into a ball. I'll see if I can find this reference.

For what it's worth, there is little evidence to suggest that butter was
widely eaten on bread in period Europe. More often it would have been
stirred into pottages to enrich them (generally on meatless days), but
also might have been eaten with a spoon like a soft cheese. It also
apparently shows up frequently in Anglo-Saxon medical receipts, I believe
being used as a way to gently dehydrate and concentrate herbs by boiling
them in butter.

There are English accounts of those wacky Heugenots eating their butter
spread on bread in the odd Flemish fashion...

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 19:44:06 -0800
From: "Anne-Marie Rousseau" <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC - butter

> Has anyone come up with any evidence that honey butter was served in
> period? The one reference I have come across was medical and very early
> (6th c.). Does anyone have period references to herb butters?
>
> David/Cariadoc

The only hint of honey butter I can find is the picture of the guy in
Platina (Platina? One of those Italian sources) standing at a tall churn,
making leche miel, whatever that is. At least that's what the caption
underneath the guy says. Could be interpreted as "sweet butter", or "honey
butter".

- - --Anne-Marie
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