Kirsten's Homemade Butter

Bringing a taste of frontier life into your own kitchen!

For my next step in my quest to eventually, at some point, make every single recipe in the official American Girl Cook Books and Cooking Studios (at least the historical ones, anyway), I decided to try something out that had caught my eye in Kirsten's cookbook a long, long time ago: homemade butter. It's something we totally take for granted as something we can just go to the store and buy, so seeing it featured in a cookbook is sort of an unusual thing, and it's something I can safely say I've never done before, so I've been eager to give it a shot for a long time. 

Originally, I had planned on it being a good way to kick off the new year, as it only requires one ingredient and equipment I've already got in my kitchen, but then life got in the way in the form of a very delayed flight back home from the holidays, and so I've been fighting burn out pretty hard this month and hoping to get back into the swing of things. Last weekend, I finally buckled up to get my taste of the pioneer life and see just how easy it is to make butter in a jar.

The American Girl Cook Books marketed themselves as historically accurate recipes the original six historical characters might have enjoyed, or do enjoy in their books, that can be made with relative ease by an aspiring young chef and/or their parents. I've had mixed experiences with this in the past, as some of the recipes are super easy and others involve too much hot oil for most parents to feel comfortable with their kiddos messing around with. Others have just produced straight up gross results, or something I can't see most kids really getting jazzed about making themselves if they're not already used to or enthusiastic about helping out in the kitchen. Not every target aged kid is a Grace or Blaire when it comes to culinary enthusiasm. 

At first blush, this recipe definitely seems like something a kid of any age could do. When I told my coworkers I was planning on doing it, one actually chimed in and said this was a really common activity for history lessons when she was growing up and attending school in Minnesota. She said her teachers seemed to see it as an easy way to get kids interested in learning about pioneer history while preforming a hands on activity, which definitely makes me wonder if this made it into the book because one of the contributors had grown up doing the exact same thing. 

(As a side note, I love hearing about regional living history lessons in classrooms like this! Growing up in Connecticut, our big thing was always the colonial period, so it's so cool hearing about how other kids grew up learning about pioneers, Texas Independence, or Spanish missions in California when I was participating in Early Guilford Days.) 

The instructions are very simple: take one clean jar, a pint of heavy cream, and a marble. The jar and marble should be chilled in the fridge beforehand to help speed the process along. Pour the cream into the jar, drop in the marble, seal it tight, and begin to shake the jar vigorously. 

(As another aside, I had intended on going really shabby chic here and doing this in a mason jar, which also probably would have been easier because there would be more room for the cream to move, but I discovered the only mason jar we own is missing its lid, so a washed out salsa jar had to do.)

The cream pretty quickly started coating the interior of my jar.

After about five minutes, the cream had noticeably thickened, but hadn't quite turned into whipped cream yet.

After fifteen minutes, I had what was starting to look more like whipped cream...

And another twenty minutes after that, I definitely had stiff whipped cream and couldn't hear the marble rolling around inside anymore.

So, to recap, I'd been vigorously shaking this jar of cream for about forty minutes straight. I'll be the first to admit I don't have great upper body strength, so this definitely felt like a sustained form of torture after a while. 

Fortunately, very quickly after I inspected it and discovered stiff whipped cream and while watching Food Network to entertain myself, I suddenly realized the sound and feel of the jar had changed completely. I looked down and discovered I was finally getting butter!

I kept shaking for another 15 minutes or so until the cream had clearly separated into butter and buttermilk, the liquidy stuff pooled at the bottom in this next picture. 

It was cool finally getting the visual understanding of just how close you are to making butter when you're whipping cream, because I somehow have always been able to get perfect stiff peaks just by feel and sight.

You can see how it separated out in the next picture too.

I shook it a little more and then decided it was time to start straining off the buttermilk. The recipe emphasizes how crucial this step is: if you don't fully process your butter and get rid of the buttermilk, your butter will be sour. 

To start, you just pour the contents of the jar into a strainer over a bowl. This gives you a decent amount of buttermilk you can either drink (which I have never understood because buttermilk smells and tastes terrible to me) or use in another recipe like biscuits or cake. Next, wash your butter in cold water to help remove more buttermilk, and finally press it against the walls of a bowl to really force that remaining liquid out of it. 

This part was actually pretty difficult. Although the butter felt decently firm when I took it out of the jar, I quickly realized my "cold" tap water was too warm for it and was softening it a lot when I rinsed it. This made pressing the buttermilk out really challenging, and I honestly don't think I got all of it, so we're going to have to eat this butter quickly. It's just an annoying quirk of living in this apartment building - sometimes the tap is super cold, sometimes it's tepid.

When you're satisfied with your finished product, press it into a mold or dish and chill for at least an hour before serving. If you want, you can also mix in salt, honey, or other ingredients to make it a compound butter. In these dishes, we have unsalted in red, salted in green, and honey butter in yellow.

With that, you're all set to spread this on bread, biscuits, bagels, or whatever else you fancy!

Now, I fully acknowledge how first world problem-y this is going to sound, but after doing this? My arms are killing me. It probably doesn't help that I've had wrist issues since my old job at the insurance company, so anything involving repetitive wrist or arm motions for any extended period can be really painful or difficult for me. It would have been a lot easier if I had been able to hand the jar off to someone else to give myself a break now and again. 

But that also makes it fairly accurate look at what a chore it was to process animal products on a farm in the 1850's. Kirsten, her cousins, aunt and mother would have been hard at work at a butter churn to put butter on their table, which isn't even getting into housing, feeding, and caring for diary cows and the dozens of other chores they would have had to do to provide for their families. I could afford to be a little lazy with washing out the buttermilk because if this goes bad, I have more commercially processed butter in the fridge I can use on toast, but if Kirsten got lazy or forgetful, she could waste hours of work. This would definitely be a really cool, fairly inexpensive activity to really illustrate to kids how hard families worked to produce things we totally take for granted. 

That being said... this took a long time to finish. I loved history as a kid, and loved pretending to be Kirsten or Felicity and fantasized a lot about living in their time periods, but I could definitely see my younger self getting bored shaking this jar for almost an hour with very little payout until the very end. Maybe if my sister and I had traded off, or if my mom and I took shifts, or all three of us, I would have been able to stick with it, but as is, I have my doubts about whether most target aged kids would have then enthusiasm to see this to the end, especially as the audience for AG gets younger and younger. 

But, I do have a possible solution! My coworker who grew up doing this in school said that her teachers actually doled out the cream in fairly small jars, which helps make this go faster because you've got less cream to actually work with. Considering her memories of this activity were more fond than not, I would guess this helped cut down on the potential boredom or frustration. 

Taste wise, it's butter! I bet you're really surprised to hear that, huh? It was definitely pretty cool to spread butter I had made myself onto one of my wife's yummy homemade bagels. I can only imagine how satisfying it must have been for Kirsten to work hard at producing something that put smiles on the faces of her family and helped add that nice bit of indulgence butter adds to pretty much every dish. As difficult as it was, I really enjoyed this foray into life on the frontier! Let me know if you give it a shot yourself.

Or if you've already tried it out!