82 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



tage cheese (smear case), buttermilk, sour cream 

 for salad dressings and the like and butter. Four 

 people can easily use three pounds of good, home- 

 made butter a week; more in the summer vege- 

 table season and if the cook knows her job. For 

 as the author of The Gun Club Cook Book says: 



"There is no 'secret' of good cooking; it is the in- 

 telligent use of the best materials and the greatest 

 of these is butter. If one uses the finest butter in suffi- 

 cient quantities, the cooking can hardly go far wrong." 



Who has not heard the reverent Frenchman cry 

 that his favorite restaurant cooks "tout en beurre"? 



With the simplest and, doubtless, most ineffi- 

 cient equipment it takes one to one and one-third 

 quarts of cream to make a pound of butter. Here 

 one may pause and speculate as to what else the 

 dairymen put into a pound of butter that retails 

 at forty-five cents besides the butter-fat that stands 

 them fifty odd cents a pound. There must be 

 monkey business somewhere. My calculations can- 

 not be that far wrong. Nor can I believe my butter- 

 churning is that inefficient. 



For a long time butter-making was my bete- 

 noire. Traditionally it is skittish and coy. Some- 

 times mine would churn in ten minutes; other- 

 whiles it took thirty-five or forty; occasionally it 

 would not churn at all. I tried sweet cream, sour 

 cream, and various mixtures of the two. I took 



