Milkin’ and Churnin’ 2006

Milk still comes from the same place it always has, but oh the difference in the way we get our milk here on this part of Sand Mountain.  Now we can go to the market and buy 2%, whole, cream, half and half or buttermilk whereas in days of yore we couldn’t do that.

Milking was one thing I never learned to do, but my parents both milked and John did the milking at his place until he went to service during World War II.  Mother was so particular with the milk and the cloths we used in the handling of such.  She used a flour sack for the straining – yes, milk had to be strained as soon as it came to the house from the barn. I still remember how that warm milk smelled – maybe that’s the reason I’ve never been a milk drinker – sweet milk, that is.  Here on the mountain most folks still differentiate between sweet milk and buttermilk, but I notice people from other parts of the country just talk about “milk.”  Also at this house there were certain cloths kept just to be tied around the milk pitchers or a larger one for the three-gallon churn.  Of course, these cloths were made of sacks of various kinds.  The flour sacks were softer, but some of the feed sacks were used as well – maybe ever some guano sacks, too.

As I remember it, two days worth of milk would be kept in the churn – that is after all had been used that was needed.  Then we waited for the milk to clabber.  That happened easily in warm weather; however, in the winter time the churn was kept by the open fire and turned often to help the clabbering procedure take place.  Mother would carefully pull back the cloth tied around the top of the churn; then tilt the crockery to one side so she could tell if the milk had clabbered.  Clabbered milk had/has a different consistency and would pull away from the side of churn.  When clabbering had taken place it was time to churn.  Churn in this case is used as a verb. Daddy had made the churn dash – I have no idea what the wood was, but it was a pole small enough to go through the hole in the churn lid and the pole had a small cross on the bottom.  Pole and cross together was called a churn dash.

To churn at this house, much was required.  First off we spread sheets of newspaper on the kitchen floor – maybe it was the Birmingham Age Herald, The Fort Payne Journal (Fort Payne was/is the county seat of DeKalb County) or the Collinsville New Era.  Milk will splatter out of the churn as the churning is done. Churn, complete with milk and churn dash, was set in the center of the paper.  Then the person who did the churning (many times yours truly) had to have clean hands and spread a clean sack towel over the lap to protect the clothes from the splattering milk. I don’t remember how long it took for the butter to make, but to a child it was too long.  After some time the yellow butter could be seen gathering on the churn lid and in due time the adult in the kitchen would determine when the churning process was complete.  Using the dash, the yellow butter was carefully skimmed off the top of the now buttermilk and deposited in a large bowl.  The buttermilk was poured in a pitcher or pitchers to be used, or in some cases sold. The butter was used for barter numerous times, but that’s the subject for another article.

Working the butter was time consuming.  A wooden butter paddle (somewhat like a spatula – except straight) was used to press the butter and remove the remaining milk. As I remember it a little water was used in this process, too.  Then the butter was placed in a wooden mold (usually with a pretty little design in the bottom), pressing it down good and then the completed butter was forced out of the mold onto a small plate.  Some people had a butter plate that came with a dome-type lid.  If there was not enough butter to fill the mold the second time, it would be rounded up on the plate to be used by the home folks, used in cooking or for barter.  At this house, the very best was saved for company.  I never heard the term “too good to serve to company” until I went to work in the big city of Atlanta; but now we use the term quite often.

A weed that grew/grows well on SandMountain is Bitter weed and when cows eat this the taste is transferred to the milk making it impossible to drink.  I’m told that some farmers kept their children busy by having them go through the pasture pulling the pesky weed, but that didn’t happen at the Windy Knoll.  Another problem we had here without electricity was keeping the milk useable in the summer time.  If milk isn’t kept cool it ruins and it was a staple here at this farm.  We drew cool water from the well and put the milk pitchers in it, but many times that was not sufficient.  Some folks were equipped so they could lower jars of milk down in the well keeping it cool and others would put the milk jars in a spring, but we had none of this here.

Another problem with having milk is that the cow would go dry some time before a new calf was born and that meant we had to do without or beg a little milk from a neighbor.  Several terms were used about a new calf being born.  Sometimes people would say “the cow had freshened,” or maybe they would say “the cow come in.”  It was a joyous time when that  happened, even though we had to wait nine days before the new milk was ready for human consumption.  Now teaching a calf to drink from a bucket is a laborious chore to say the least.   Often times when I do a program for a group I repeat a little poem about teaching a calf to drink and even though Aunt Bill recited this a few weeks ago, here goes again:

The hardest thing on a farm, I think
Is teaching a little new calf how to drink
You pull and tug and get his head in a pail
And he’ll stand there and twist and just wiggle his tail
And then the first thing you know
Kerplunk goes his nose and you’ve got milk all over your clothes
Hold onto your patience, your teeth you must grit
If you can’t hold your temper, you might as well quit
For Mother Nature whose methods don’t fail
Never meant for a calf to drink from a pain.

Just a few memories of how it used to be with country living.