With the wooden scoop I lifted the butter, taking the big gobs first.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 16, 1943.

“Hooray!” yelled Jimmie Frise, waving a letter.

“Surely not,” I said. “Surely no good news!”

“My Aunt Judy,” cried Jim excitedly, “has got her arthritis back.”

“Back?” I protested. “Is that good news?”

“It’s an ill wind,” said Jimmie, bringing the letter over, to read to me, “that blows nobody good. Listen to this:

“‘Dear Jim:

“‘When you were a boy you used to come over and help me with my churning. Now, when every pound of butter is a real part of the war effort, my arthritis has come back and I simply can’t churn. If you have any weekends free these times you could drop around and visit your old auntie and at the same time do a bit of war work that is sorely needed.'”

Jimmie waved the letter joyously and executed a few dance steps around the office.

“But, Jim,” I interposed, “why all the excitement? This can mean nothing to you. Your Aunt Judy can’t let you have any more butter than you can buy at any store.”

“What?” snorted Jim. “You mean my Aunt Judy, on the farm, can’t give away any butter? Even to her favorite nephew?”

“Not a fraction of a pound,” I assured him solemnly.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Jim. “Don’t tell me the law has invaded the sanctity of the farm home and the family.”

“Your Aunt Judy,” I announce “if she made a single pound of butter that she failed to report to the government, would be a bootlegger, a moonshiner…”

“A buttershiner!” said Jim. “Don’t tell me that’s the law.”

“That is the law, my lad,” I asserted. “And if you don’t believe me, call up the local office of the wartime prices and trade board.”

“But it’s preposterous,” scoffed Jim. “Butter!”

“That’s what the boys who drink booze said when prohibition came in,” I explained. “But it’s preposterous, they said. Liquor!”

“Don’t try to compare booze and butter,” declared Jim warmly.

“Why not?” I inquired. “If what you like is taken away from you, you are indignant. A great gulf has divided those who wanted booze from those who hated booze. A vast gulf filled with the darkness of misunderstanding. But now, when a comfortable dowager who hates booze but loves butter is faced with being deprived of what she loves, she has the heaven-sent chance to try to understand the agony and trickery and schemery of a booze hound who tried to beat the law. Let all people of good-will beware of buttershining. Let all who love justice for others be just to themselves and stick to half a pound of butter per person per week.”

“Poor Aunt Judy,” said Jim tenderly. “She’s got the arthritis back.”

Law and Intention

“Snap out of it, Jim,” I warned him. “You thought it was a wicked and vicious thing not only for bootleggers to operate but for people to patronize bootleggers. If I remember you right, you used to claim that it was not the bootleggers but the people who patronized bootleggers on whom the real guilt lay. So don’t go around trying to bootleg the odd pound of butter in the delusion that it is merely butter. The greatest weakness in human nature is the notion that your case is different. But I say unto you that it is purely a moral question and a patriotic question. Have you got the guts to stick to half a pound a week? Or are you, like a lot of smart people, a little lacking in guts which you make up for by smartness?”

“I was hoping,” sighed Jim, “that you and I could go out to Aunt Judy’s tomorrow for the week-end and churn her butter.”

“Jim,” I said, “if you don’t believe me, call up the wartime prices and trade, board office. It is contrary to the intention of the law even to beat up a little butter with an egg-beater or electric mixer…”

“Where could you get the cream?” demanded Jim.

“Cream off the top of the milk bottle,” I announced.

“But look,” protested Jim. “If a quart of milk has certain food values in it, and if I prefer to use those food values by beating up little butter instead of drinking the milk-“

“Don’t squirm,” I warned him. “That’s the way the old bootleggers and moonshiners used to think. They used to say: Here I have a few bushels of potatoes. What does it matter whether I boil the potatoes and eat them or let them ferment and drink the alcohol out of them? The law is the law. The intention is the intention. To help fight this war, the government has organized certain controls, many of them as little and apparently meaningless as a spike or a switch on a railway track, but without which the whole system cannot operate.”

“So if I cheat on butter,” mused Jim, “I might as well cheat, say, on making cartridges. I might as well fill cartridges with sand instead of cordite.”

“Correct,” I said. It is time we all started playing the game. We are needed, up till now, to let the airmen and sailors and soldiers play the game for us. Leave it to the soldiers. They volunteered, didn’t they? But now it begins to seep into us that we all have to take a piece of the war. I heard a dandy at lunch yesterday. A man who hates Mackenzie King got going as usual. And the man lunching with him interrupted him mildly and asked, ‘By the way, how much do you get for that?’ ‘That what?’ inquired the other. ‘That stuff you are spouting about Mackenzie King? How do you mean?’ demanded the other indignantly; ‘how much do I get for it?’ ‘Well,’ said the other fellow, ‘don’t tell me you are doing it for nothing when there are guys in Buffalo and Detroit and all along the border who would gladly pay you $15 a week to go around spreading that kind of stuff. Why, the Germans have spent millions of dollars all over the world hiring people to do that work. Don’t tell me you are working for the Germans for nothing!'”

“What happened?” asked Jim, delighted.

“The luncheon broke up,” I advised.

“Well, sir,” said Jim, “you’ve certainly taken the joy out of life regarding Aunt Judy.”

“Ah,” I said, “but I still think you should go and help your Aunt Judy do her churning. It is less than 30 miles out. It is a little used branch line of the railroad. I’ve been on that train when there weren’t two dozen passengers. In fact, churning up a batch of butter strikes me as a very useful activity for a couple of city men on a week-end, with nothing better to do.”

“A couple of city men?” inquired Jim happily.

A Useful Activity

So we left on the noon train and arrived at Aunt Judy’s farm before 2 p.m. And she was very delighted indeed to see us.

“I sort of knew you would come,” she cried.

And we took our coats off and put on the aprons Aunt Judy laid out for us. In the outer kitchen, back of the main farm kitchen, we found the churn on its sawhorse legs standing ready. It was a regular barrel which rocked violently when you turned the crank. A little window in it allowed you to peek and see how the butter was coming.

“You will have to wait about an hour,” explained Aunt Judy, “while I set the cream out to come to room temperature. It’s cooled now, so if you’ll just lift it into the room…”

So Jim and I carried the pails and cans of cream from the cream shed into the kitchen. and poured most of it into big pans and open dishes, the sooner to reach room temperature. And Aunt Judy took us into the main kitchen, where we sat in rocking-chairs around the big stove and talked about butter.

“Do you know,” said Aunt Judy, who is very prominent in the Women’s Institute and reads all sorts of encyclopaedias and almanacs, “that Canadians are probably the biggest butter eaters in the world?”

“Aw, now,” cried Jimmie.

“Even in the United States,” declared Aunt Judy, “where they have the highest standards of living in the world, the per capita consumption of butter is only 17½ pounds per annum.”

“Holy smoke,” said Jim. “Is that all they use? Why, that’s only a third of a pound of butter per person a week.”

“Then what are we Canadians kicking about,” demanded Jim, “at a half a pound per person per week?”

“In Britain,” went on Aunt Judy, “the per capita annual consumption is about the same as the United States, between 17 and 18 pounds a year.”

“And what do we use in Canada?”

“In Canada,” declared Aunt Judy triumphantly, “we consume 27 pounds per capita per year! Ten pounds per person more than the United States, 10 pounds more than the British Isles. We are a butter-guzzling race, we Canadians!”

“Maybe it is because we are a northern race,” I suggested. “Look at the Eskimos. They need fat so badly they eat raw seal blubber.”

Aunt Judy’s Churn

“We Canadians,” said Aunt Judy, “are terrific cake eaters. We cook with butter, where more frugal nations use cheap fat. We soak butter into our potatoes. We slather bread with butter. We have a beaver for our national symbol. We would be more honest if we had a pound of butter on our coat of arms.”

“Well, then,” said Jim, “I don’t feel so bad about being cut down to half a pound. But I’ve seen my family use six pounds a week for the six of us. A pound a week per person.”

“That’s not uncommon,” agreed Aunt Judy, “the lavish way we cook and prepare our meals. Canadians, I imagine, have the highest standard of living in the world, when it comes to the domestic side.”

“What a right little, tight little island we are in Canada,” I smiled, thinking of our vast size and our little scattered population all busily greasing its insides with choice butter.

So we went into the outer kitchen and got to work.

“It’s the simplest thing in the world, making butter,” said Aunt Judy. “Just pour in the cream. Start the churn. And after while you see flecks of butter appearing on the little glass window. Keep right on. And at last, you take off the lid and there’s your butter, solid gobs of it, floating on top of a lot of buttermilk.”

Into the barrel churn we poured the thick sweet cream.

“With sour cream,” announced Aunt Judy, “the way the factories do, they have to doctor the cream up with bacilli.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“But creamery butter made from fresh cream,” said she, “keeps in storage far better than butter made with sour cream. The Danes proved that. They set the pace for the whole world in butter. When I was a girl, butter used to be highly colored and salty. The Danes started to show the whole world how to make butter with its natural lovely pale yellow color, its waxy texture and hardly any salt at all. That’s the way I make it.”

We put the lid on the churn and clamped it down. And, while Jim started the crank, I gathered the big wooden bowl and the big wooden spoon like a ladle, and rubbed salt into them so the butter wouldn’t stick.

All that butter is, is cow grease and elbow grease. The cow gives milk. Aunt Judy puts the milk in the separator and takes out the cream. And Jimmie and I supplied the elbow grease. Turn about.

“It takes,” said Aunt Judy, “27 pounds of milk to make one pound of butter. When the cream’s taken out, you have the milk left. And when you take the butter out of the cream you have the buttermilk left. But it’s really very simple.”

And simple it was. Jimmie cranked until he was flushed. Then I cranked until I was flushed. It took about four flushes each and then the little flecks of butter started to appear in the small glass window in the churn. First, the cream turns to whipped cream. Then the water in the cream, which is what cream mostly consists of after all, begins to come loose from the steadily whirling and crashing contents.

The Final Spurt

You could even tell by the feel of the churn, as it swung and banged, that there was something lumpy developing inside.

When we unscrewed the barrel lid of the churn there, floating on the top, was the gorgeous, pale yellow mass of the butter, with the buttermilk streaming and draining off it.

“Okay,” said Jim, seizing the big wooden bowl. “Scoop her out.”

And with the wooden scoop I lifted the butter, taking the big gobs first and the lesser gobs until I finally strained quite small globules and blobs off the surface of the buttermilk.

And with the wooden spoon Jimmie kneaded and patted and squeezed the butter in the bowl, forcing all the buttermilk out of the waxy mass. The exact amount of salt Aunt Judy had left in a dish, and this Jimmie kneaded and kneaded into the butter still in the wooden bowl.

Aunt Judy came back from feeding the chickens and supervised the cutting of the butter into pound “prints,” as she called them. There was a small wooden box, also salted so the butter would not stick, which we pressed into the mass, filling it. The box held exactly a pound of butter, and it had a false top with a handle. When the box was squeezed full you just held it over a square of wax paper and shoved down on the handle, forcing the pound of butter out, beautiful, yellow and pure, on to the paper.

The box also printed Aunt Judy’s name right into the butter.

Twenty-six pounds we got for the churning.

“And much as I’d love to reward you boys,” said she, “with a pound of butter each, I can’t do it. I have to have my license to make butter. I have to report every pound I make. I am allowed only half a pound a week per person in the family for myself. And I must turn in a coupon and a record of every pound I sell.”

“Don’t mention it,” said both Jimmie and I. “It was a pleasure.”

But we did lick our fingers.

And at supper, before we drove back in the cutter to catch, the 8.47, not a pat of our butter did Aunt Judy produce; but only the butter dish in which, carefully cut into squares, was some of Aunt Judy’s former churning.

“But,” said she, marching in with a huge white granite pitcher such as is used at church socials, “there is no rationing of buttermilk!”

And we drank most of the pitcher, full of the sweetest buttermilk that ever swelled your neck; and we each carried home a gallon jug of it.

Editor’s Note: This seems to be another war-time public service announcement, rather than one of their regular stories.