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Years ago, we always had a cow, and “Bossy” is the only name I remember the cows being called. Daddy and the boys always did the milking. Mama and Lucille, my oldest sister, could milk, but I guess it was considered a man’s job. Most of us girls never learned how to milk. But looking after the milk was definitely women’s work.

When the milking was done, all the cats gathered around in the stable, hoping the milker would squirt some milk their way. The milk was always good except when the wild onions came up in the spring. If the cow ate a lot of wild onions, you could hardly drink the milk or eat the butter. Fortunately that didn’t last long.

The milk had to be strained through a cloth and poured into gallon-size glass jars and stored in the icebox or the refrigerator, after we had electricity. I think the jars came from the school cafeteria; they must have purchased mayonnaise and mustard in gallon jars.

Before people had iceboxes, they used various ways of keeping milk, butter and other food from spoiling. Bill Cummings remembers that the Travis Sharon family had a cement box or trough in the branch near the spring. The water flowed through holes or openings in the box to keep food cool. Others put food in the well bucket and let the bucket down into the water just far enough to keep the food cool.

My aunt Clara Angel said when they lived at the Clay Brittain farm, they had a milk-hole. Grandpa dug a hole about the size of a grave near the house and even built steps to go down in it. He put boards in the bottom to set the food on and then made a cover of boards to keep animals out. Necessity really was the mother of invention for folks in earlier times.

We had plenty of milk and cream for whipped cream — the real thing, not the kind of topping you get in a container at the grocery store now. We used to come home from school and fix hot chocolate or cocoa. We’d skim off enough cream from the top of the milk to have whipped cream in our cocoa. What an after-school treat that was.
But the way we enjoyed whipped cream the most was with Mama’s strawberry stack pies in the spring. We usually had a small strawberry patch or picked some at a neighbor’s.

Mama would bake several pie crusts; there were no frozen ones back then. After the berries were washed, chopped and sweetened, she’d put a browned crust in a large plate, fill it with strawberries, stack another crust and fill it with berries until all the crusts were used. Then came the whipped cream on top. That was food fit for a king!

There was always enough milk to let some of it turn or clabber, and then it was time to churn. We had an ironstone churn with a wooden dasher. The lid to the churn had a hole in the middle for the dasher handle, and you sat and lifted the dasher up and down until the butter formed. Your arm would get so tired you thought it would fall off.

Later we had a square metal churn with removable wooden lids. The churn sat inside a metal frame. That one had a wheel on the frame that you turned round and round until the butter formed. It was a little easier on the arm than the dasher churn.

My grandmother Elizabeth Josephine Scarlette (1878-1950) taught her small daughters, Dianna and Clara, a short rhyme to recite while they were churning. They probably used a dasher churn. The rhyme was: “Come, butter come; Peter’s standing at the gate; Waiting for a butter cake; Come, butter come.” Wonder how many times they repeated it while they were churning.

After the butter formed, you scooped the butter into a large pan and poured the buttermilk from the churn into jars. The buttermilk would have little flecks of butter in it and was delicious, especially with corn bread crumbled into a glass full of buttermilk.

The next step was to work, or knead, all the milk from the butter — another workout for your arm. Then it was time to mold the butter. The molds were made of wood, and ours had a sheaf of wheat carved into the mold. The butter was packed tightly into the mold, with no air holes, and the sheaf of wheat design showed up on the butter. I think ours was a half-pound mold.

Sometimes Mama would sell some to a neighbor, but we ate most of it. We all loved to eat it on her good, hot biscuits. When tomatoes were ripe in the summertime, we looked forward to hot buttered biscuits with a slice of tomato on each biscuit! They’re still good now, even though the biscuits aren’t homemade. We always had plenty of butter to put in vegetables when they were cooked. A special treat was apples sliced and fried in butter.

After the butter and buttermilk were taken care of, all the jars and the churn had to be washed and scalded. Then the jars were hung outside on the jar rack in the sun and fresh air so there was no milk smell. Of course, when the jars needed to be used again they had to be re-washed, after you shook out any little spiders that had taken up residence inside the jars.

The jar rack was similar to what is now called a bottle tree, but the jar rack actually was a cedar tree that had been cut down and put into the ground like a post. Cedars had a lot of small limbs that were cut off but left long enough to hang the jars on. There was a lot of work involved from the time the cow was milked until you finished, but that whipped cream, buttermilk and fresh-churned butter was worth all the work.

Gladys Scarlette is a local historian, lifelong Summerfield resident and author of two books about Summerfield.