Sweet-Cream Butter 403 



But, aside from the use of sweet cream for direct 

 consumption or for the making of ice-cream, we must 

 consider it in its important relation as the raw material 

 for the manufacture of butter. The vast significance of 

 the latter as an article of diet will be readily realized 

 from the fact that the product of more than one-half 

 of all the cows in the United States (there were 18,000,000 

 of them in 1900) is turned over to the butter-maker. 

 The important material interests involved in this agri- 

 cultural industry have stimulated extensive inquiry 

 into the economy of butter-making and have thus brought 

 to light a long array of interesting facts. The dairy 

 bacteriologist has played a prominent part in discover- 

 ing and explaining these facts and the butter-maker 

 owes to him much of his ability to produce a uniform 

 and high-grade product. 



Sweet-cream butter is made from cream immediately 

 or soon after it is separated. In some of the European 

 countries the demand for such butter is very large. 

 In the United States the demand for it is almost wholly 

 confined to the cities with large foreign populations. 

 The success in the making of sweet-cream butter de- 

 pends essentially on the checking of bacterial growth 

 in the cream. As far as possible, the latter must re- 

 main unchanged in flavor and composition; hence, 

 in its preparation, the milk is quickly removed from 

 the barn, passed through the centrifuge, and the 

 cream at once cooled to a low temperature. The opera- 

 tion of churning is hastened as far as possible, and 

 is performed so as to exclude bacterial contamina- 

 tion. 



