Such things as butter and cream and milk are so pack aged, container and cartoned these days that the romance of manufacture escapes one.
Which takes me back to our underground dairy in the country with its mysterious annexes of preserves and shelves of honey and the shining separator that night and morning, flowed with milk.
Anything underground these days is seen in the light of a nuclear shelter. But the only fall-out on the underground dairy were the petals of the flowering almond tree above it in spring and the rain in winter.
The dairy had a steeply sloping roof and you went down stone steps through the door with a latch and into its cool tranquillity.
The separator was a machine of Scandinavian origin; from Sweden we were told by the traveller who sold it to us. It had a handle and flywheel, two spouts, and whirling aluminium, or was it tin? dishes that fitted over a spindle and spun at a furious speed and sent the cream rich, yellow and nutritious, into its container and the milk skimming into a bucket.
As you worked up speed the fresh milk ran from its bowl atop the machine into a smaller reservoir with a float and then fed into the magical works below. For a child it was a source of wonder; the separator had a plaintive, whining song, perhaps reflecting the Nordic temperament of its inventor made melancholy by long winters and stark pine forests with Lapland a tundra or two away to the north.
Later one would wash the separator parts, dismantling the machine with an air of importance before fitting it back together again, ready for the next milking.
The cream would be necessary for the next process in the butter churn, again with a handle and a wooden beater inside. Again more rural delights, the smack of the beaters, the butter congealing and appearing inside until the yellow in was ready for loving attention by two small paddles with which our parents beat the substance into shape, beaters that left tiny squares imprinted on the oblongs of butter.
There was something personal about it all. The grass was home grown, the cow was milked in the rickety shed, an operation of kicks and interruptions for abdominal necessities. So it went until the butter was there in its cool safe, in yellow, accessible rows carefully cubed in grease-proof wraps. All our own work with the help of the cow and the machine from Scandinavia.
Some cream was kept. One luxuriated with cream and its dolloping delight.
For, in the inner annexe, the jars of honey, jam and the bottled fruit caught the light through the windows at ground level. Quinces flushed a deep red, peaches yellowed and mellowed, all of them smug and syruped, waiting for the summons to the Sunday dinner table when the guests were there and the cream appeared in an heirloom jug and the butter sat in a sliver dish. Products of the farm. All our own work.
There was a meat safe, too, in the underground dairy. It was heavily fortified by fly wire, for the country files were small, fast interceptors while the old blowies drowsed in lazy but watchful reconnaissance outside, longing for an open door or an uncovered leg of lamb. But security was good; doors stayed bolted; safes were as unassailable as a strong room.
Sometimes at night we’d creep into the dairy for another oblong of butter and pause a moment to observe the moonlight through the little windows, a dramatic moonbeam falling on the separator aglint with mystery.
The cows were long gone to pasture, charging their udders for the milking dawn.
There was a cheese rapped in muslin, and lay, a white ghost, on shelf, and its scent wafted into the night and sent the mice in the nearby haystack mad with logging and bringing some brave adventurer on tiny frantic feet to fling itself into oblivion in the claws of the old farm cat that guarded the pantry.
This cat never stirred far and had none of the nocturnal adventures that seemed to make neighbouring cats suffer and yowl in marital torment.
It just sat waiting for milk and mice, tabby jowls lit by the moon and its claws quiescent, claws that unsheathed, could strop stockings into a maelstrom of ladders or tatter the sides of the old settee.
The dairy at right was mysterious indeed, with its ghostly shelves of jam and its boulevards of butter, the shadows of trees moving in a silhouetted dance on the whitewashed walls.
One stood and listened and almost heard the earth itself sighing and moaning for the great cares it bore, feeding the needs of cows and cats and human kind.
One would tiptoe out at last with butter in hand to receive a “where have you been child” as some guest, butter madness in his eyes awaited this culinary reinforcement, his knife poised, ready spread.
My butter now comes from the supermarket It awaits me in its legions in massed refrigerators; its labels bannering its brand like a thousand others. My cream is one of a battalion of cartons stamped with its USE BY code.
There are no singing separators to work their magic, no spinning works, no high-pitched song. Milk still comes from cows they say and one must be thankful at least for that.
A home there is no underground dairy and we shan’t be building our fall-out shelter just yet.
When open the refrigerator door the light comes on with awful efficiency and I notice there are no moon beams on the butter.
Max Fatchen