Making Butter With My Great-Grandmother's Butter Churn

My Mom gave us an old butter churn that belonged to my great-grandmother.  It is an old antique item, but it still works.  We dried off the cows on Friday, so we didn't milk Saturday or Sunday.  It was the first day in two and a half years that we didn't milk!  We made some butter on Saturday as it will be the last fresh milk we have for a number of months until the cows freshen.

The first three photos are out of order.  I took photos of the butter churn after we were done to show you the old mechanism, so the churn has buttermilk and butter on it from the process.  Here is the churn:

It is simply a gallon glass jar with gears, a crank and a rod with wooden paddles on it.  It is superbly built.  They made things to last back then.  It reminds me of an old Merle Haggard song where he sings, "I wish a Ford and a Chevy would still last ten years like it should."

Here are the wooden paddles that spin as you crank it that eventually separate out the butter from the buttermilk.

Now that you see the mechanism, here is a little less than half a gallon of cream in the jar that Tricia is cranking to turn into butter.  It helps to allow the cream to come to room temperature before cranking.  This will hasten the time to make butter.

You will immediately know it when the butter "breaks."  You can feel it when cranking.  Suddenly instead of liquid in the jar, you can feel something solid in there.  It's BUTTER!

Now you have to pour off the buttermilk.  This doesn't get wasted.  Tricia made homemade blueberry muffins Sunday morning before church using the buttermilk.  Rich and tasty!

The butter is put in a bowl and the buttermilk fills a quart jar.  The work isn't quite done, though.

We use a spatula to squeeze the remaining buttermilk from the butter.  By rolling the butter over and over and pushing down, you can squeeze out more buttermilk.

Once done, we add a pinch of kosher salt and stir it in

And there we have it.  Fresh butter from Clarabelle and Rosie.  The last of it for several months.  We also make butter just shaking it in a quart jar, but there's something special about using a family heirloom from several generations back to make it.

Eat your heart out, Land 'O Lakes.  This is Land 'O Swamps Butter.  C'est Bon!