DAIRE DAIRY. 



583 



have been visited are very beautiful and fertile, and 

 rise, for about 150 miles, with a gradual slope, but 

 wiiiiout any great elevation. The soil is a deep, 

 rich clay, yielding maize, millet, and Guinea corn, in 

 abundance. The inhabitants are warlike and fero- 

 cious. The government is an absolute despotism. 

 The ferocity which prevails among this nation almost 

 surpasses belief. Human skulls form the favourite 

 ornament in the construction of the palaces and tem- 

 ples. The king's sleeping chamber has the floor paved 

 with the skulls, and the roof ornamented with the jaw- 

 bones of chiefs whom he lias overcome in battle. 



DAIRE, or DAIRO. See Japan. 



DAIRY (from dey, an old English word for milk) ; 

 a building appropriated to the purpose of preserving 

 and managing muk, skimming cream, making butter, 

 cheese, &c., with sometimes the addition of pleasure 

 rooms for partaking the luxuries of the dairy, as syl- 

 labubs, cream with fruit, iced creams, &c. 



In the erection of such buildings as are necessary 

 for dairy purposes, two things ought always to be 

 kept carefully in view, conveniency of situation, and 

 the preservation of a proper temperature, if the 

 buildings are inconveniently situated, much labour 

 will be lost ; and, if the air in them be either too 

 hot or too cold, no process will go on as it should do. 

 Their size will be proportioned to the number of cows 

 kept, and their interior arrangement to the busi- 

 ness intended to be carried on, whether this be cheese- 

 making, butter-making, or merely the preservation 

 of milk for sale. A dairy-house for forty cows may 

 be twenty feet by sixteen ; and for a hundred cows, 

 forty feet by thirty. Ornament is sometimes studied 

 in the erection of a dairy-house ; and this, when it 

 happens to be the case, will, of .course, regulate in a 

 great measure the situation of the building. 



A butter dairy, when well constructed, consists of 

 tliree apartments or rooms ; one for depositing the 

 milk, one for performing the operation of churning, 

 and another for containing and cleaning the neces- 

 sary utensils. A cheese dairy should consist of four 

 rooms ; a milk room as before, a room for making 

 and pressing the cheese, another for the process of 

 salting, and a fourth for stowing and preserving the 

 cheeses, till they are ready to be brought to market. 

 This last may be conveniently placed as a sort of 

 loft over the other three. The milk dairy properly 

 requires only two apartments ; one for the milk, and 

 the other for serving it out, scalding, and cleaning 

 the different utensils. Temperature in a dairy is of 

 the first importance ; for, if too much heat be admit- 

 ted, the milk will quickly become sour, and if too 

 i;okl an atmosphere prevails, neither butter nor cheese 

 making can be carried on with success. 



Different plans have been proposed for securing a 

 proper degree of heat. Double walls and roof have 

 been recommended by Dr Anderson ; others have 

 proposed hollow walls ; and Mr London, in his 

 Treatise on Country Residences, thinks that, for com- 

 mon purposes, a vacuity of eight or ten inches left 

 betwixt the wall and the lath and plaster, will be 

 sufficient. A fountain, or jet d'eau, where such can 

 be commanded, will always be a very agreeable and 

 convenient acquisition in a dairy. Mr Marshall, 

 who lias paid much attention to this subject, advises 

 that the walls shall be at least six feet thick, a foot 

 on the inside to be of brick or stone, the outside to 

 be constructed of sod, and the space between to be 

 closely filled with earth. The roof, he says, should 

 be of thatch, three feet thick at the least, and should 

 project completely over the walls on each side. The 

 materials of such a building being all bad conductors 

 of heat, it would, he conceives, ifprovided with dou- 

 ble doors, naturally preserve in this climate a tem- 

 perature of about fifty to fifty-five degrees of Fahren- 



heit at all seasons of the year. But, as the milk it- 

 self, when brought in warm, would naturally tend in 

 summer to raise the temperature too high, an ice- 

 house is recommended to be attached to the dairy, 

 of a simple and ingenious construction. A small 

 quantity of ice, placed, when necessary, in the milk 

 room, would soon lower the temperature to any de- 

 gree that might be wanted ; and if the cold ; in win- 

 ter, should become too great, a barrel of hot water, 

 close stopped, or a few hot bricks placed on the floor 

 or table of the milk room, would readily counteract 

 its effects. A chaffing-dish, with burning coals, 

 should never be used, as it is apt to communicate a 

 bad taste to the milk. Many other simple and cheap 

 forms of dairy-houses are found to answer well. Mr 

 Marshall tells us, that, in Wiltshire, the rooms of the 

 dairies have commonly outer doors, which open under 

 a pent-house or lean-to shed. This he considers as 

 a great advantage, for it communicates, by affording 

 shade, a beneficial degree of coolness to the whole 

 building. 



The utensils required in a dairy are principally 

 the following : milk-pails, milk-strainers or sieves, 

 milk-cowls, coolers or pans, milk-skeels or creaming 

 dishes, lading dishes, skimming difhes, cheese lad- 

 ders, cheese vats, cheese presses, am, churns. Wood 

 has in general, been employed in their construction, 

 and is probably, upon the whole, the most eligible 

 material. Lead, brass, and copper, are altogether 

 inadmissible ; for the acid contained in milk (which 

 is now known to be the acetic) combines with these 

 metals, and forms with them poisonous compounds. 

 The same may be said of earthen vessels glazed with 

 lead ; and it is obvious that true porcelain, or glass, 

 can never come into general use for dairy purposes. 

 Cast iron, itself, is far from being unobjectionable, 

 because, though the acid of milk does not form with 

 iron a compound that is poisonous, it forms with it 

 one, which may, in a considerable degree, alter the 

 taste and quality of dairy products. The least objec- 

 tionable of all the metallic milk dishes, are probably 

 those invented by Mr Baird, of the Shotts ironworks, 

 in Linlithgowshire. They are made of cast iron, 

 softened by annealing in charcoal, so as not to be 

 liable to break by an ordinary fall, turned smooth in 

 the inside, and laid over with a coat of tin, to prevent 

 the iron from coming in contact with the milk. Even 

 these, however, we do not think quite free from objec- 

 tion, because, though the iron does not come in contact 

 with the milk, the tin does ; and, though the acetic 

 acid acts upon tin only in a slight degree, still it 

 acts upon it, and forms with it a compound, which, 

 when evaporated, is viscid, and has a very fetid, 

 disagreeable smell. It may, therefore, be supposed 

 to injure, in some degree, the products of the dairy. 

 They are, however, much more easily kept clean 

 than wooden dishes, and their superior power of 

 conducting heat, cools the milk put into them so 

 much faster, that Sir John Sinclair says, " the 

 farmers' wives, who have given them a fair trial, 

 affirm that they throw up one-third more,cream from 

 an equal quantity of milk. " It has been lately found 

 that slate makes very good inilk coolers ; and in 

 some of the midland counties of England, the com- 

 mon flag, or transition slate, has been employed for 

 this purpose. Still more recently it has been disco- 

 vered, that milk vessels lined with zinc produce a 

 greater quantity of cream, and in a shorter time, 

 than any other vessels, and that the cream produced 

 is destitute of acidity. 



Dairy farms, in general, consist chiefly of meadow 

 and pasture, with only a small portion of the land 

 under tillage. But Mr Holland, in his Survey of 

 Cheshire, and Mr Curwen of Workington, in the 

 fifth volume of Communications to the Board of Agvi- 



