Although food fashions have changed over the years, and health advice has also lessened the use of certain foods, we still have with us this popular expression, "That's our bread and butter!" The expression comes from a day when bread and cow butter were looked on as the most basic of foods, staples of the human diet. I can recall that during the early decade of my life, the early 1940s, I had never even heard of any kind of butter substitute. Butter was cow butter, and we never thought of eating anything else. And, as a dairy farm family, raising milk cows and selling milk was the main focus of our family business. We used milk from our own cows to churn our butter, and many of the foods we ate made use of butter.
Our family used butter for straight bread and butter sandwiches, buttered toast, butter stirred into Karo Syrup or into sorghum molasses, butter and peanut butter sandwiches, butter on baked potatoes, butter on sweet potatoes, butter on cornbread, butter on ginger bread, butter and cinnamon on toast for breakfast. That only begins to speak of the many uses of cow butter in feeding a family. As I recall, when oleo-margarine first began appearing at the grocery stores, it was white, not yellow. Butter of course is naturally yellow, and people didn't want to eat a butter substitute that was white, so the oleo came with a little tube of yellow coloring. Before putting the oleo on the table, you had to mix in the coloring to make it yellow and more attractive for spreading on bread. I remember in the late 1940s we tried the new "oleo." I didn't like it, and I guess the other members of the family didn't like it either, so we went back to our cow butter. Probably part of our motivation to stick with cow butter was because we saw the new butter substitute as competing with our business, which was producing milk, butter, cheese, cottage cheese and so on. But, to my taste, the new oleo, and even its later refinements, never tasted nearly as good as "real" butter.
Some years later, one of the margarine makers started selling their product under the brand name, "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." They even had the handsome Fabio on TV advertising their product. They would have you believe that it is the greatest, and that it tastes just like real butter. Somehow I have always been able to tell the difference between real butter and "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." Actually I can't believe anyone would ever say that "I can't believe it's not butter." If they do say it about that stuff, I'm thinking they must never have tasted real butter.
Churning butter was about the first work I did as a small boy. I was probably about 5 years old when my mother got her first Dazey Churn. Before that she had churned butter in a half-gallon glass jar. I was probably about 4 or 5 years old when she filled that jar about three quarters full of milk, and gave it to me to "churn it." The idea was to shake it and slosh it until the butter formed in the milk. At first I thought it was fun! I could really make it slosh, and for a while it was fun making a commotion. But, the butter took a long time to "make." I shook it and shook it, and shook it and shook it, and finally, about the time I thought the shaking was going to rattle my head off its perch, the butter came. I really appreciated that batch of butter, because I had worked my head off to make it, but when we got our new Dazey Churn, with its glass container and wood-veined dasher and the nice crank and gears to turn it, that was much more fun.
Times change, and concerns about some of the downsides of butterfat on heart health has meant that cow butter is not nearly as popular as it once was. Once upon a time the butterfat in milk was "the" commercially valuable part of the milk. When my own father was growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, they milked cows, but used a "cream separator" to separate the cream (butterfat) from the other parts of the milk. It was the cream, not the whole milk, which was sold on the market. Dad told of carrying the can of cream to Avoca to put it on the train and ship it to the processing plant where it was made into butter for the markets. The family consumed part of the left-over milk from the separator, but much of it was fed to the hogs to fatten them. The most popular dairy cows in that time were the Jerseys, because their milk had a high butterfat content, like 8 percent.
During the mid-20th century, people began changing from using high-butterfat milk and butter to using lower-fat milk. The Jersey cows slipped from popularity, and were replaced in dairies all over the country by dairy breeds like the Holsteins, which are high milk producers but which make milk which is low in butterfat, like 3 percent to 4 percent. Today, probably the best-selling milk is not whole milk, but 2 percent or even 1 percent butterfat. It's a different world.
I knew things were changing even back in the 1950s, when my city cousin from Illinois was visiting us with her family. At breakfast one morning, my mother asked her if she would like a glass of milk? She answered, "No thank you, I only drink pasteurized."
To that, her father responded, "Why, Alma, just look at all those cows out there on the pasture!" OK, our milk was pasture-ized, but not pasteurized and not homogenized and not reduced-fat. It was just plain milk, and our butter was just plain butter.
•••
Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history, member of the Pea Ridge Alumni Association and vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 07/12/2017