PRESERVATION OF BUTTER.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1859, 7 February 1880, Page 3

PRESERVATION OF BUTTER.

The ‘‘Times” sates that a discovery has been lately made which brings a new element into the calculation of the future of the trade in butter. From the high position which the Aylesbury Dairy Company occupies that company are continually applied to with reference to schemes, plans, and patents for improvements in dairy work ; innumerable trials have been made of the proposals of inventors, and hitherto they have proved of little practical value. At last, however, a process of preserving butter has been proved successful, the result involving great consequences which no ons yet can adequately foresee. On the 24. h of July Mr Q-. M. Allender, the managing director of the company, put a churning of butter to the test, treating it in accordance with a new patent brought before him. The butter, in a muslin cloth, was placed in a firkin, without a particle of

salt, and every precaution taken to ensure that there should bo no tampering with the experiment. Te firkin remained on the premises at St. Petersburg!! place, Bayswater, for three months, and when examined on Octobe 24tb, it was as sound and sweet as when first put in. Practically this butter was exposed to the atmosphere during the whole lime, seeing that air found free admittance into the firkin. Without treatment the butter would have gone completely putrid, but on smelling and tasting it was found perfectly sweet, firm and so excellent in flavor that it could not be told from butter made the day before. Experts in the business, both in this country and in Ireland, have had samples, and pro nounce the preservation wonderful; the only difference they find being that newly-made butter (and this first-rate of its kind) has a peculiar aroma not quite equalled in the preserved butter ; while the latter is considered a little “ dead,” so that just a trace of salt in it would be an improvement The effect will be to drive all salt butter out of the market. In order to make it keep, the Irish and all imported butter is now mixed with 5 or 6 per cent, of salt. Under the new system 1 per cent, of salt will be ample for the purpose, and the cost of the preservative will not exceed half-a-crown for a 561 b. firkin, or little more than a halfpenny per pound.