Trying to store your butter
I invite you to look to humour for truth. This afternoon I caught a short story where someone was asked if he had ever bought anything that he really didn’t need. We all can think of things like that and in this case the man said that he had bought a butter churn. As the story continued he was asked if he had ever actually used it and he replied, once. A turn full of butter is a lot of butter. Now I know that churning butter was something that would have happened in my grandmother’s home. The family was large enough to need butter among other things but what I really wonder is how do you store all that butter. They had an ice box I remember it because it stood just outside the door in the back porch; a pain really because you had to buy ice for it. And that one ice box was used for all the things in the kitchen that needed cool storage. There was no freezer. Just the well as far as I know. That meant that the kind of things you do in a farm like butchering a hog had to be planned out. There was no room for large amounts of anything. Unless you had a really good bunch of neighbours who were willing to take on your excess and then share theirs at a later point, you had to plan for what could be kept and what couldn’t. Think about it. What would you do with a gross weight of pork chops. Sort of like that butter it had to be stored somewheres. The proverb, «waste not, want not» applied first of all to those who lived on small family farms. Given that I would love to revisit in my time machine the comforts of the kitchen with my grandparents, I now want to know how they handled excess. We do it through timely trips to the supermarket but they had no such luxury. The local stores were good for things like bread, yeast, molasses and big sacks of flour. I figured that the first canned goods to come into her kitchen had something magical called condensed milk. Available only after a factory had opened in the city and you could load a few cans on the train. A very different lifestyle from what we have now.
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