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Hi Jen,
Our brief discussion about buttermilk was interesting and brought up some good memories. I had forgotten a bunch of stuff about it -- I had participated in the hand-churned butter-making process as a disinterested, reluctant child -- so now it is fun to review it and analyze what was going on back then.
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I looked it up and now I remember something: Butter is made, of course, from the cream that comes from whole milk BUT if you separated the milk using our hand-cranked cream separator, that resulting cream was no good for making butter. No, to make butter, you needed to just let the whole milk sit a while and allow the cream to naturally rise to the top. Then you would skim the rich golden cream off the top of the container and into the butter churn. This (I learned today) is because the extra time allows a bacterial process to take place that lowers the pH in the cream, making it easier to beat it into butter.
Our homemade butter came out of the churn in big chunky globs and would appear on our dinner table in an odd shape. This caused us some embarrassment in front of guests because it lacked the "proper" rectangular shape of the more sophisticated, store-bought butter stick that city kids and more progressive farmers trusted.
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To avoid this humiliation, some housewives would squeeze their new butter into molds for a more modern table presentation. Your grandma Bev didn't bother.
Dad would drink up the leftover butter-making liquid, known as traditional buttermilk, always proclaiming it to be delicious. We children disagreed vehemently. I think our word for it then was "icky." Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of this by-product left over, so we were never required to drink it. We just let Dad think it was a luxury.Cultured buttermilk is a different milk product, but similarly named. Given my history with the traditional stuff, I have never had an urge to experiment with cultured buttermilk.
Thanks for the memories,
Stan
