This recipe has been imported from its original location as part of the “home dairying” section over at the old European Cuisines website. It’ll be expanded, with new images and videos, later this month.
These instructions assume that you have a mixer with a wire whisk, or beaters suitable for whipping cream with. This will not work in a blender or Cuisinart, so don’t bother trying. You’ll wind up with a mess, and waste your ingredients.
(a) Fit the wire whisk (or cream-whipping beaters) to the machine. Put the cream (chilled down quite cold, to 45 F) into the bowl. Whip like crazy.
(b) After about ten minutes it’ll do what they always told you it would if you overbeat it: it’ll “break” and turn to lumps of butter. Stop whipping.
(c) Pour off the buttermilk. Use it to bake something with: it’s terrific.
(If you get that far, that is. We always wind up drinking ours. The flavor is far superior to that of cultured buttermilk.)
Now things get slightly tricky. If you want to keep this butter for any period of time, you’ve got to get all the remaining water and buttermilk out of it: otherwise it’ll quickly go bad.
In the old days, to do this job they used a specialized pair of tools called “Scotch hands”. These are a pair of wooden paddles with grooves carved down their inside surfaces: you would press the butter hard between them (or between them and a scrupulously clean work surface) to squeeze the water out. There are still some specialty cooking shops that carry these. But if you can’t find them, you can do exactly as people did in the old days when they didn’t have Scotch hands: you knead the butter exactly as if it were dough, and blot the expressed water off the work surface with a dishtowel or similar.
You have to keep the butter cool, which may mean putting it in the fridge to “rest” it after every fifteen minutes or so of work. But for a smallish amount of butter (less than a pound at a time, say) the kneading process won’t take you long. It becomes remarkably easy to work with even while cool, sort of like Play-Doh, and not as greasy as you might think.
Keeping your hands cool helps. Some of the people who used to do this kind of thing recommend rinsing your hands in cold water frequently. I suppose one could also use rubber or plastic gloves if preferred. Treat the stuff quite roughly while you’re kneading it: this helps knock the water out.
Once the excess liquid is gone from the butter, you then add salt, partly for flavor, partly to help keep the butter good.
The remarkable adaptability of the stuff starts to show itself at this point. In the old days, people who wanted to keep butter for a long time would knead large amounts of salt into it, and put it down in a bucket of brine, down in the root cellar or in some other cool spot…then, when they wanted to use the butter again, they would take it out and wash it, kneading the butter under running water, or frequently changed water, to get rid of the excess salt. This may sound bacteriologically suspect, but it actually works very well, especially when the brine is concentrated enough. Also, if you’ve gotten all the non-fatty milk solids out of the butter, the bacteria have nothing to work with anyway.)
Knead in small amounts of salt until you like the flavor. (Or leave it sweet / saltfree if you prefer: but note that it will not keep for as long.) Then shape the butter into whatever shape you prefer, and wrap and store it.
A quart of cream should make between half a pound and three quarters of a pound of butter. You may want to experiment a little with your local creams to see which has the highest butterfat content.
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