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HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1957-09-19, Page 7How Mother Used To Make otter When you see a quaint country character, usually a sad little woman with ingrown perplexities, jerking a broom handle contrap- tion up 'n' down, the director of the dramatic effort then in pres- entation is not necessarily dem- onstrating that these people make their own butter - he is telling us that the action takes place outside the city limits and in an earlier era. He could just as well have a moose blat, or lightning arrester cables slapping the clapboards in a high wind, but custom has developed the churn as an unalterable essen- The sa character might be popping corn, or paring the last 45f the apples, or straightening secondhand shingle nails, but custom leads us to conclude that the dasher churn is what country people turn to when they cogitate inwardly on their woes and no reliable T.V. play can do with- out it. One can sensibly ask, "Why the churn?" For making butter is never an integral part of the program, and has no essential meaning within the dialog. Clas- sical unities, as laid down by all authorities from Aristotle on, sug- gest that a churn, if it appears, should then be followed by some business which forwards the in- culcations of the plot. Seeing a churn, which the sad character is belaboring, one has the right to assume. that shortly butter will figure in some important way in the sequences. It is a critical fact that in the past 25 dramatic churnings I have witnessed, they n.ver made any butter, and but- ter' never got mentioned. I have come to believe that.none of these stage churns has any cream in it anyway. I suppose it would be wasted time, at this late date, to tell in a general way how butter was made. Ceeam was accumulated preferably from a butterfat -type cow like a Jersey, and while it was still sweet Mother would warm it to the proper tempera- ture and insert it in the churn. You could make butter all right from cream that was just a little bit older ' than sweet, which is why a great many people say they never liked "dairy" butter. Cream that was too old made muscular butter. You could get much the same unfortunate effect by neglecting to wash the butter thoroughly after it was churned - and if you got butter that was made from elderly cream and didn't get washed enough you would notice it right away. But if the .cream was sweet and the butter got properly washed and salted, 'here never was a creamery but- ter yet to touch it. I can't remember, offhand, what the temperature was. It was sort -of room temperature, but there was leeway enough so a woman could guess at it. You could churn cold cream until your eyes fell out and your arms fell off, and still have cream. And it wouldn't stand being het too much. But with the tempera- ture right, butter would come fairly soon, and without too much stress and strain. I can't remember that Mother ever turned the crank except on the tail end to corroborate our insistence that the butter had "come." This was when the fatty globules separated from the watery, or buttermilk, part and adhered to each other to make chunks. If it felt to her that it had come enough, she dismissed us and took over the gathering and washing. She pounded and patted and turned and folded, and added a little salt at a time, and eventually formed it in pat- ties and dabs. We had some molds, but unless you planned INCOGNITO -Sheep are timid creatures but there aren't many that'll go to these lengths to keep out of the public eye. The Hampshire sheep are wearing these wraps to protect their fleece before entering the judging ring at the State Fair. to sell butter it was just as use- ful in patties. I think most of the great dram- atic churners, troubled emotion- ally with insoluble problems, de- picting their inner passions - if they were really churners - would work it as Mother did. She loaded the churn and said, "There, now . keep it moving." As she rolled pie dough and wash- ed cookie tins and• peeled pota- toes she kept one ear on the churn, and if whichever of us was on duty missed a revolution she mentioned it. I always felt she timed my turn fo s about 25 min- utes before a ball game, and I kept the crank going without the slightest hitch so I could get there in time to play. If there were no game, and nothing special to call rne, I dillydallied at the crank. " My sister caught me once. She was churning, and she said, "Keep it going a minute while I rat my arm." Then she went away. I was never equal to arranging any similar mean trick to get even with her. She had some kind of a misguided fancy that the in- cident was funny, but I never did. Everybody hated to churn. The dasher churn, favorite of the tragedians, had many mech- anical •faults. The up 'n' down motion was extremely tiring, and after 10 minutes you • would be changing hands every four or five strokes. Then the handle would wear in the hole, and a churn with any experience at all would be little more than a pis- ton that squirted cream in your eye. I think, too, that the vertical action of the dasher was an in. efficient coagulator, and much less effective than a splash or paddle churn. A very good churn was a smallish barrel mounted on a frame, and when you turned the crank the barrel would ro- tate end for end. Baffles inside agitated the cream and brought. butter soon. But it took a lot of cream to make such a big churn useful, and it took strong arms to turn it. Our family used the regular round churn with'a pad- dle wheel in it, which would take care of a couple of cows. When the cows tapered off we wouldn't have enough cream even for that churn, and sometimes butter got made in a bowl with an egg beater. It seems to me the chief reason why a rural character, depicted on stage and screen, would be sad and melancholy would be the lack of somebody to turn the crank or jerk the handle. This would be a thing in itself, and momentarily would overshadow any other emotional stress. Such a country character would be talking about the churn itself, and not about mortgages falling due, or family apart, or why they don't let Henry out of jail. Show me a symbolic churn, and I'll show you who never worked one.. - by John Gould in The Chris- tian Science Monitor. CROSSWORD PUZZLE I ACROSS 63. Satin fabric 1. Household 55. Jubilant duties 67. Skillfully 7. Electrical unit 63. Dethrone 12, Fame DOWN 14. Having 1. Diadems small spheres 2. Brave 19. Conjunction 8. Along 16, Circus acecm- 4. Hawser panlment 18. Chin. Ales sure 19, Had on 21. Legal action 22. Gaiter 24. Cyclades Island 25. Chopped 27. Amer. Indian 25. Chopped 27. Amer. Indian 28. Divisions of Ern act 30. Merchant 72. Swamp 23,Optical organ i4. Baffled 87. Placed at Intervals 40. Resinous substance 41. Falls to keep 48, Exist 44. Writing fluids 48. Born 9P. Heavenly body 43.15. xndiart fiber plant 49. Keeper of P. toll gala 5". Nota of 1h4 swop - 5. Female sheep O. Traps 7. Mistreated 8. Came together 9. Go by 10. Past tense ending 11. Tell 12. Redactor 17. Novel 20. Male deer 23. Odorous animal 25. German Philosopher 28. Abysses 29. Incline the head 31. Babylonian deity 34. Omitted In Pronouncing 05. woolly 35. Burro 37. Appeared 33. Rubs out 39. Ridicule 42. Understand 45. Point of land 47. Crackle 50. Poorly 51. Malt beverage 54. About 56. Toward I a 3 4 5 b •:''''.:•,:.7 8 9 to 11 12 r5 ^r f0 A14 i7 . - > y I$ IS 19 20 2B 21 ,,,,,,,v2,? 25 '17727 23 24 2,3 31 :Pr SSG 5 51 a.a2 (lnswer elsewhere on this page, FARM FRONT A recent dispatch from the far west regarding feeding experi- ments they have been making there should be of real interest not Only to p 3s tr'y raise but to farmers in general as well. Here it is. 4 4, 4 Washington State College sci- entists have found a way to make barley and other cereal grains as good feed as corn. This discovery is of particular import- ance to farmers in the Pacific Northwest, since this area is short of corn. Working with chicks a n d poults, Drs. Leo S. Jensen .and James McGinnis, and research assistants Ramon Fry and John Allred have discovered a treat- ment using either water or an enzyme mixture for; barley that gives as good bird• growth and produces as much meat per pound of feed as corn does. * qt 4 "This discovery should mean much to farms in areas such a ours," explains Dr, McGinnix' "On the Seattle feed grain in ket barley is currently quote $45 . a .toss and OWA,{ portation charges average $22.50 ' on Midwest corn." m * Healso points out that the United States is about the only big corn feeder in the world. "Most of the rest of the world feeds its livestock and poultry on other cereal grains. Their big problem is to get the calories for their animals. This process Mould be a real boon to them." :F Up to this time, barley, .•for example, has only rated about 70 per cent the feeding value of corn for chicks, and about 80 per cent for laying hens. Now they'll rate equal. 9 4 . The water treatment, accord- ing to the WSC scientists, works also with soybean oil meal, rye, and wheat. Even corn itself f improved by undergoing the treatment. The enzyme treat- ment so far has worked best with barley and rye. e * 4 Here's how they "soup up" the grains. The grain is soaked in an equal weight of water until it absorbs all the water. Then it is dried, ground, and mixed in a regular poultry ration. * * * Tihis works, they believe, be- cause the water is able to un- lock some of the carbohydrates } formerly inaccessible in the grain. Enzymes also might do this, they reasoned. The results proved about the same. : grains for other single -stomach animals, too. Animals with sev- z eral stomachs -for example, the cow -are able naturally to get as much nutrition from other X. cereals as from corn, but single- stemach animals are not. 4 What's this discovery worth to poultrymen? At four weeks of age, the scientists' birds had gained 190 pounds more per ton of feed on the treated barley than they did on the untreated. * * The extra meat is worth about 38,,to the farmer. So the birds :Only will produce more meat - ";i) eg in more money, but n . co±n - deficient'"' ffl1' save money by buying locally available grains in - of importing corn. * * .4 The researchers believe what they've found out will apply to BREAD WINNER Six-year-old Sally Greene took first prize in a masquerade contest at Southend -On -Sea, Essex ,Eng- land, with her costume cele- brating the wonders of bread. Pigtails, necklace and dress decorations are all fashioned of the staff of lift. • Shipping Air By Freight One thing that's free in the Soviet Union is air. There's late of it, too. Too much, in fact, Pravda admitted recently as it told about a new Soviet indus- try that has already overfulfiill- ed some of Communist boss Khruschev's goals for world supremacy. Out east in Vladivostok, It turned out this summer, a rail- road traffic manager had been meeting his freight quotas by shipping carloads of water from place to place with such enthu- siasm that tank cars were occa- sionally frozen solid in transit and roadbeds washed out by "de- liveries." But In the game of fulfilling quotas, he was an `ama- teur compared with the opera- tors of the new industry - shipping air by railroad freight. Soviet rail wages are computed on the volume of shipments. Some years ago, the Soviet railroads began using large crates for shipment so that mechanized loading would save money. These became "very popular" on a number of rail lines, according to Pravada's re- port from V. Ocheretin, an em- ployee of the Sverdlovsk ter- minal on the eastern slope of the Urals. In the last ten years, the number of such crates in use has multiplied 35 times. Many of them, however have been loaded with air. A check of waybills on the Sverdlovsk line showed the average crate (total capacity unspecified) con- tained 688 pounds of air, Oche- retin said, and one had 1,760 pounds of the stuff. "And those who transport the atmosphere are getting bonuses!" the Sverlovsk man complained. He calculated that the Sverd- lovsk railroad alone shipped 1 million tons of air last year and demanded: "What about the rest of the country?" The cost of shipping the air averaged out to $3.50 per ton. - From NEWSWEEK. Upsidedown to Prevent Peeking Emma mmum34 DU ©H J lX3 ©©HO. o©© ©©JH ©DU U0II _©I ] OEMODU MEOW 0©©..: WOO , MOOD ®00®©U 000 JU 1W ©hI muno-mo El= UW . ©H!M©0J0 E7 a©dko[H000©ULJ mum/ BEOLIMN IINDAY SC1 IZS By Rev. R. Barclay Warren B.A., B.D. Daniel, Steadfast In Crises Daniel 5:1, 5, 13-14, 16b, 17-18; 22-28 Memory Selection: Be strong itt the Lord, and in the power of His might. Ephesians 6:10. Daniel had an eventful lane. While a youth, captive in. a for- eign land, he purposed in ht$ heart that he would not dell himself. The decisions we make in youth are important, not only for their immediate conse- quences but also for their $V nificance in the moulding es life's pattern. God blessed Dani giving him knowledge and skill in all learning and all wisdom. The rise and fall of world empires is nearing its final phase? according to the outline givens by Daniel in his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. The Chaldean, Persian, Greek and Roman empires have all dee cayed. We now see nations o$ iron and clay, signifying strengthi and weakness, but no dominating power. We know not how soon the stone cut without handl shall break in pieces and cone sume all these kingdoms and the kingdom which God will set up shall stand for ever. Of the many dramatic scenes in the life of Daniel, the one in the prir; ed portion of today' lesson is one of the most excit- ing. King Belshazzar had been drinking wine with a thousand of his lords. He sent for the gold and silver vessels his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem and they drank from them and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. Men are more dar- ing and reckless when they have been drinking. But suddenly there was a calm. The fingers of a man's hand appeared writ- ing in the plaster on the walL Daniel was called to interpret. He pronounced the nation's doom in the words: "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and fin- ished it", "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting", and "Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians." That night Bel- shazzar was slain and Darius the Median took the kingdom, Daniel, the man of God, wag steadfast in the crises. Our greatest need today is men and women who fear God and keels his commandments. To be born. of the Spirit as Jesus taught i the best preparation for the crises of life. Round '' p Time on Tomato Farm Virtually stretching to the ho- rizon, acres and acres of toma- toes form a neat pattern (above) at the B and 1. Farm Company in the Homestead - Redland region near Miami. The world's largest growers of tomatoes, developed the uni- que monster, centre of phoio, to help harvest the crop, which covers some 8,000 acres in an 18 -mile -long strip. The only part of the harvesting opera- tion done by hand is the actual plucking of the fruit from the vines. The pickers spread out in front of the . machine and dump the tgmatoes (right) onto the massive conveyor belts. The belts stretch out 165 feet on either side of the central unit. As the tomatoes roll to the cen- ter, they are graded and sized, and rejects are discarded. At the central unit the tomatoes are packed in field crates. it takes 107 men to satisfy the 13onsters's "'appetite."