CHAPTER X. 

 B UTTER-MA KING. 



Separators. Churning. Washing the Butter. "Working the Butter. 

 Making it Up. British and Foreign Dairy Produce. 



SINCE the year 1880, when things had gone worse in farming, 

 we have heard no end of talk and read no end of writing 

 about the superiority of foreign butters, but specially those 

 of France and Denmark, and the wholesale evictions which 

 have been always going on of English butter from the 

 best English market, viz., London, in consequence of the 

 imports of these selfsame foreign butters. Wherever the 

 firkins of France and Denmark, of Germany and Sweden, were 

 seen in the towns and cities of England, the cry at once arose 

 that our home butter was being shouldered out by the foreign 

 product ; and when Danish butters were seen in Dublin, the 

 capital of what might be made the finest butter-producing 

 country on earth, some people went off into hysterics and 

 declared it was all " up a tree " with British dairying. 



That there was truth in what was said about foreign butters, 

 we must admit, but not all or nearly all of it was truth. The 

 chief reason why foreign butters have invaded all our cities and 

 not a few of our towns lies in the fact that we could no longer 

 supply our own wants from our own soil. The next reason 

 was this : the foreign butters possessed the one important 

 characteristic of uniformity in colour, flavour, quality, &c., 

 which was so conspicuously absent from our own. 



This uniformity was the result in Denmark of improved 

 methods of making the butter, and of making it in large co- 

 operative dairies, and in France of classifying and blending it 

 in large establishments which catered for the English trade. 



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