A GOOD JUDGE OF BUTTER.

Timaru Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 2761, 30 July 1883, Page 3

A GOOD JUDGE OF BUTTER.

Some one wrote to the Agricultural Gazette, asserting that " a halo, healthy farmer with a robust appetite " could not bo a good judge of butter. In the next issue the following vigorous protest against such doctrine appeared : — " Although I have long enjoyed persistent good health, and, by a malignant combination of circumstances, have been long engaged m farming, I claim to know good butter. I remember thirty years ago coming home from Milan — via. Switzerland, France (Normandy), Dioppo and Kent -and being asked by a jeering senior what I had learnt by my journey. I replied, 'To appreciate the full excellence of this' — i.e., tho lunch he was giving me, which wns brown bread and butter and homebrewed nlo m a farmhouse. Many times sinco then have I endeavored, both with Danish, French, Dutch, Scotch, and Irish butter, to improve upon home produce, and I am bound to say that, up to this moment, I have never tasted any butter superior to the best English, and I doubt if I ever ate any other as good. Butter is for me the great dainty of the day ; and on this, if fine or not, the whole character of at least two of my meals depends. If the butter be good, I eat it, by preference, to anything elao, and take the proper concomitants. If the butter be not up to tho mark, I vary the whole meal rather than spoil one by eating ill-flavored butter. I am sorry to be so egotistic, but I want to make it plain that I am a qualified combatant m giving an opinion. I deny that the fastidiousness of ' the sedentary or the invalid ' constitutes an authority againat which no man may appeal. On the contrary, I believe that a man's opinion of butter is to no small extent an index of his physical condition. Good health, and good out-door exercise, do, m fact, fit a person to pronounce a verdict on butter, and do not unfit him for his task. The best butter can only come from everything being ordered aright from the cowhouse to the breakfast table. Butter really is a test of almost everything with which it comes into connection — of the farmer's skill to feed hu stock and govern their attendants, of the housewife's qualifications, of the eater's bodily condition. As I judge, it ia impossible to lay down any hard and fast rule by which to judge of any of the three better than this — ' Does it turn out, or doss it appreciate good butter V It is not for nothing that the phrase got into use describing a man of tact, 'He knows on which side his bread is buttered.' Seriously, to end this my contribution to a controversy, I wish we could invent a Btandard by which to try butter-makers. They are either the torment or the benefactors of mankind. The gentleman m Miss Austin's ' Emma,' who liked his gruel 'thin, but not too thin,' might have been chairman of a Royal Commission for this purpose, but I fear he is out of reach."