The Fourth Part of the Prosperity of Germany

you may also learn to make good butter.

If you desire to make butter with the aid of Spiritus Salis that is beautiful, pure, and yellow, and possesses the best flavor, and does not easily contract mold or rancidity, you will achieve this by the following operation. Take cream from good cow's milk at the proper time and churn it into butter before it becomes moldy or acquires an unpleasant taste. Separate the whey in the usual manner, and place the butter in a wooden vessel, washing it for so long with pure and cold salt water until no more whey remains, and that salt water returns and flows away as clear as it was when poured in, and the butter appears sufficiently clean. It must be washed once more, as follows. In pure and rectified cold Spiritus Salis, dissolve as much salt as it will hold. Wash your butter again with this a few more times, and indeed do so by stirring it well with the spirit, which through such an operation will consume the residual cheese—the cause and origin of rancidity—which ordinary salt water could not remove. Once this is done, the butter must be seasoned in the usual way with common salt, and it will remain in its due state of goodness for a long time. For this operation, that coarser sea salt is considered more suitable, which, having been slightly heated in the fire, gains an excellent whiteness, allows itself to be reduced to flour more easily, and in goodness surpasses that which is boiled down in iron or leaden vessels or brass cauldrons.