Butter, Thanks To Laura

I will admit, the approach of the public school I went to as a kid varied as much as its teachers, but one teacher in particular seemed to have found the best of both worlds. She was our fourth-grade teacher, and read aloud to us every day. She was probably the first teacher who really supported and encouraged my love of writing, and inspired in her class an interest in and enjoyment of history. One day while we were studying the pioneers, she brought cream to class and had us "churn" it in a glass canning jar. Each of us took turns sloshing the cream around in the jar until it finally, miraculously, turned into butter. It was the one and only time I ever made butter as a kid despite being raised by my grandparents who were born in the 1920's and probably saw their share of homemade butter.

Now, years later, I'm looking back on that butter-making with a smile. The correspondence school my kids are enrolled in has a wonderful hands-on curriculum, and as part of the fifth-grade study of American history, the kids are encouraged to get some heavy cream, put it in a canning jar, and slosh it around until it turns into butter. So over the last few years as both my girls went through the fifth grade one by one and dutifully sloshed their allotment of cream, I got to watch their eyes grow round with astonishment and delight as the foamy white mess in the jar suddenly morphed into thin white liquid with a large yellow lump in it. Watching them, it all came back to me--the wonder, the magic of something as simple as a pat of homemade butter.

Now that they've both gotten past that part of the curriculum and moved on to other studies, we've found another reason to make our own butter. As part of our local-food transition, I looked at the package to see where our butter comes from. Apparently, it's made in Texas. Or distributed from Texas. That's a very long way for that butter to travel, and doesn't fit into even an extremely generous definition of local for us. The almost-organic dairy farm where our milk comes from, however, is at least in Idaho. That's a start. I checked, and they don't do butter. But they do have heavy cream, and...hey, I have the technology to make butter. All I needed was a quart glass jar with a lid, the cream, and a pair of hands. Other than that, I needed a quick look at one of the kids' Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which described what to do with the resulting lump of butter to make sure you've gotten all the buttermilk out of it, and presto--local butter.

As it turned out, that one quart of cream went a very long way. We whipped some of it for use on a local-apple pie. I used the buttermilk left from making the butter in an Irish soda bread recipe I wanted to try. And after all that, we were still left with a pat of butter almost large enough to fill a typical-sized butter tub.

One of the usual objections to local and/or organic foods is the cost. This was one time when I saved money by going local and doing a couple of steps myself. I added up the cost of a container of whipped cream, a small tub of butter, and a pint of buttermilk, and lo and behold, buying those things separately came to more than what that one quart of heavy cream cost me. I'd call this experiment a win, and once we've used up all our Texas butter, we won't be buying more.