History of Butter

Butter-Making Traditions

The making of butter goes back thousands of years. During the summer months cattle herds were often taken to hills and mountain pastures by women who herded and milked the cows and lived in 'booley huts’. They stayed in these huts throughout the summer months, only coming down for Mass and to bring the butter in firkins (barrels). In time the kitchen became the traditional place for housing and using the churn.

The traditional type of Irish churn, the dash churn, was a strong vessel, stave-built, with a conical body and splayed top into which fitted the lid. This dash churn eventually gave way to the barrel churn which had a larger capacity and was mounted on a stand. Butter was sometimes decorated with a wooden stamp called a butter print. The surplus results of family butter-making over domestic needs gave rise to trading and set the seeds for the modern dairy industry.

Butter Bogs

For many years, it was believed that the burial of butter in bogs had superstitious overtones, although it is now seen as an early attempt at conservation. The exclusion of air and the turf’s antiseptic qualities would have prevented the growth of mould. The custom dates back as far as the sixteenth century at least and continued until the end of the eighteenth century. The practice of preserving butter in bogs or in moist earth is also found in Scandinavia, Iceland, India and Morocco.

Types of Butter

There were various kinds of butter, including gruiten, which was heavily salted to preserve it. Im ur, (fresh butter), was for quicker consumption, and was regarded as superior to gruiten. Sweet-cream butter, that is butter made entirely from fresh cream, was rare; most 'country butters’ were the result of successive days’ skimmings of cream held in large crocks until churning day, when the cream had soured a little.

Butter-making resulted in a number of delicious and highly-valued by-products. There was the 'thick milk’ left after the cream had been skimmed off, and the buttermilk left in the churn when the butter was taken out.

Butter Exports

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ireland was the major butter exporter in northern Europe and the Americas. Indeed much of the butter shipped from Ireland to Europe was reshipped across the Atlantic to markets such as the West Indies and the Americas. All this butter was highly salted in order to preserve it on long voyages often in warm latitudes. Roughly two thirds of this butter was shipped from the ports of Cork and Waterford which between them dominated the dairying economy of the south. From the 1760s, England, in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and a rapidly expanding population, began to import Irish butter in quantity, and by the end of the century it had become the main export market for Irish butter. By the 1770s butter exports were twice the level of the 1680s and by 1835 they had almost doubled again.

Cork Butter Exchange

Cork was the great emporium of the butter trade, especially for distant regions and in 1769 the butter merchants formed a voluntary organisation, the Cork Butter Exchange, to superintend the public inspection, branding and making of butter for export. For over a century every firkin of butter passing through the doors of the Cork market was rigidly examined and graded, and the price for each grade was fixed every day. The system survived in its original form until 1884 when new conditions had begun to make it redundant.