Do you know what these are? My husband did when he found these in an antique shop and bought them for me. They are butter molds.
I haven’t used them yet, but I intend to. They are pretty, and I have visions of lovely little pats of embossed butter sitting by each person’s place setting at Thanksgiving or a lunch with some ladies from church or a little girl’s tea party.
I first heard of butter molds when I read the account of Caroline Ingalls making butter in one of the Little House on the Prairie books. It was many years ago that I read it, but it always stuck with me because it taught me to have joy in the doing for my family, to go the extra mile for them. Making butter for the family would have been one of Caroline’s regular household chores, but she put forth the extra effort to make things pretty and special:
“Laura liked the churning and the baking days best of all the week.
In winter the cream was not yellow as it was in summer, and butter churned from it was white and not so pretty. Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty, so in the wintertime she colored the butter.
After she had put the cream in the tall crockery churn and set it near the stove to warm, she washed and scraped a long orange-colored carrot. Then she grated it on the bottom of the old, leaky tin pan that Pa had punched full of nail-holes for her. Ma rubbed the carrot across the roughness until she had rubbed it all through the holes, and when she lifted up the pan, there was a soft, juicy mound of grated carrot.
She put this in a little pan of milk on the stove and when the milk was hot she poured milk and carrot into a cloth bag. Then she squeezed the bright yellow milk into the churn, where it colored all the cream. Now the butter would be yellow.
When the cream was ready, Ma scalded the long wooden churn-dash, put it in the churn, and dropped the wooden churn-cover over it. The churn cover had a little round hole in the middle, and Ma moved the dash up and down, up and down, through the hole.
At first the splashes of cream showed thick and smooth around the little hole. After a long time, they began to look grainy. Then Ma churned more slowly, and on the dash there began to appear tiny grains of yellow butter.
When Ma took off the churn-cover, there was the butter in a golden lump, drowning in the buttermilk. Then Ma took out the lump with a wooden paddle, into a wooden bowl, and she washed it many times in cold water, turning it over and over and working it with the paddle until the water ran clear. After that she salted it.
Now came the best part of the churning. Ma molded the butter. On the loose bottom of the wooden butter-mold was carved the picture of a strawberry with two strawberry leaves.
With the paddle Ma packed butter tightly into the mold until it was full. Then she turned it upside-down over a plate, and pushed on the handle of the loose bottom. The little, firm pat of golden butter came out, with the strawberry and its leaves molded on the top.
Laura and Mary watched, breathless, one on each side of Ma, while the golden little butter-pats, each with its strawberry on the top, dropped on to the plate as Ma put all the butter through the mold. Then Ma gave them each a drink of good, fresh buttermilk.”
Did Caroline have to take the trouble to grate and boil the carrot just to have yellow butter? No, she didn’t have to, she wanted to. That makes me stop and think sometimes – am I just doing the bare minimum as a keeper at home? Making sure my family has what they need, of course, but maybe not bothering to put forth extra effort to make things a little more special, a little more pleasant, a little more obvious that someone really loves them and wants to show them?
The Titus 2 woman is to be a keeper at home, but she is to have joy in the doing. Our family should be the people we love most on this earth, aren’t they worth doing the most for?