Our viands

The most ancient butter of which we have any real know- ledge is that known as bog butter, which is dug up from time to time in Irish peat-bogs. Two or three crocks of this butter may be seen in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; it looks like a large lump of chalk, but still retains its fatty nature, and burns like oil. From the hairs which are found in it, the colour of the cows from which it was derived has been ascertained, but at what period it was buried, and for what reason, is not known. It may, perhaps, have been hidden in troublous times, or it is just possible it may have been buried as cream, in order that it might be converted into butter, this process having been resorted to with success at the Cape, after an accidental discovery that cream buried in the earth will turn into butter without churning, only the butter thus produced is not so good as that made in the ordinary way by churning. Even at the present day, in some parts of Ireland butter is made in a very primitive fashion, by churning unseparated milk, the temperature being raised by the addition of hot water. This, of course, leaves a very large proportion of butter- milk, which is eagerly sought by the peasantry to serve as sauce to their potatoes, or to make cakes, instead of yeast, for which purposes it is admirably adapted. Butter- making in England, unfortunately, is by no means so much thought of as in the old times, when every farmer's wife and daughter looked upon that and cheese-making as a portion of their education, as well as their own especial daily task, and were not ashamed themselves to convey DAIR Y PROD UCE 1 2 i their produce to market. Things are altered now : the farmer sends milk instead of butter and cheese to market, and London is largely supplied with foreign butter and cheese, not only from Holland, which was formerly the chief source of import, but from Brittany, Sweden, America, and Canada, the imports of cheese from the latter country having increased so enormously of late years that it is almost impossible to obtain English cheese at an ordinary cheese factor's. Then, too, the methods of butter and cheese-making have been greatly modified by the introduction of machinery. It is now no longer necessary to wait many hours for the cream to rise in order to skim it off — machinery separates the cream at once from the new milk, and at the great agricultural show at Windsor in 1887,- a machine was exhibited which was a combination of churn and separator, making cream or butter from new milk as desired, by merely moving a lever, and turning out a pound of butter a minute. In our childhood, to watch the process of cheese-making was a never-ending source of amusement. Great was the delight of being allowed to stand on a stool beside the big tub, deep enough to drown us, whilst the dairymaid first cut into the vast mass of curds and whey, sometimes good- naturedly giving us a basin of the delicious compound to eat, whilst she strained off the whey, cutting the curd with a large double-bladed knife, piling it up in huge flocculent masses, and dipping out the whey with a brass or tin dish ; then, breaking up the curd with her hands, heaping it into vats lined with clean cloths, and putting the embryo cheeses into a press to squeeze away all the remaining whey, 122 OUR VIANDS