584 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



The best churn to use is a revolving barrel or box churn; the 'butter 

 should not be churned together in a lump, stop churning when the butter is 

 in granular form about the size of wheat kernels and the buttermilk should 

 then be drawn off, then pure cold well water must be poured on the butter 

 and the churn turned forward and backward a few times and the water 

 drawn off and fresh water put on again and so on until the water is clear of 

 buttermilk, usually water put on three or four times is sufficient. 



Now, the butter is ready for the salt, about one and one-half ounces of 

 dairy salt to a pound of butter, must be well mixed with the butter but 

 should not be worked more than just enough to mix the salt with the butter, 

 and then put in a cool place twelve hours for the salt to dissolve when it 

 can be reworked and packed ready for market. 



MAKING CIDER VINEGAR AT HOME. 



F. H. Hall, New York Experiment Station Bulletin No. 258. 



The making of cider vinegar is a familiar operation in almost every farm 

 home. The final product is a necessity on every table, the small apples 

 from which it is usually made are of practically no value for other purposes, 

 the labor and expense of picking them up and pressing them are slight, and 

 from the time the cider is in the barrel Nature does the work. Thus the 

 process appears a simple one, easy to start, and self-operated to its termi- 

 nation in a salable commodity; so that the work-burdened farmer, with several 

 barrels of cider in his cellar, may, in his few moments of leisure, think with 

 pleasure of his farm operation which may bring him profit without further 

 outlay of strength or money. 



Yet vinegar is a food product and, as such, has come under the eye of 

 State law; which says that to be legally salable the finished goods must meet 

 certain requirements. Cider vinegar must contain 4.5 per cent of acetic acid 

 and 2 per cent of cider vinegar solids before it can be lawfully sold, and 

 frequently farmers who hare made vinegar from pure apple juice only, and 

 who have stored this under what they believe proper conditions for the 

 proper length of time, find that their product falls short in one requirement 

 or the other. Thus, without fraudulent intent or attempt at adulteration 

 or dilution, the homemade vinegar falls under suspicion. Complaints of 

 this condition reached the station in considerable number some years ago 

 and in an effort to find the cause or causes of the difficulty an extensive in- 

 vestigation of the subject has been made. Cider has been pressed during 

 different years and from different varieties of apples, and has been stored 

 under varied conditions, with and without additions of yeast, "mother" or 

 additional malic (apple) acid. In all, thirty-six experiments have been car- 

 ried through periods of time varying from forty-four months to seven 

 years. Each sample of cider was analyzed monthly for ten months and at 

 two-month or three-month intervals after that time, attention being paid to 



