made in the American style
with salt, which, in its own kind and way, has a merit not inferior to
that of England and France. Many prefer it, and it certainly takes a
rank equally respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and worked
so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it might make
the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but salted with
care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether even a
fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to the white,
creamy freshness of his own. Now I am not for universal imitation of
foreign customs, and where I find this butter made perfectly, I call it
our American style, and am not ashamed of it. I only regret that this
article is the exception, and not the rule, on our tables. When I
reflect on the possibilities which beset the delicate stomach in this
line, I do not wonder that my venerated friend Dr. Mussey used to close
his counsels to invalids with the direction, "And don't eat grease on
your bread."

America must, I think, have the credit of manufacturing and putting into
market more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of the
world together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which prevail in
it are quite a study. This has a cheesy taste, that a mouldy,--this is
flavored with cabbage, and that again with turnip, and another has the
strong, sharp savor of rancid animal fat. These varieties, I presume,
come from the practice of churning only at long intervals, and keeping
the cream meanwhile in unventilated cellars or dairies, the air of which
is loaded with the effluvia of vegetable substances. No domestic
articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily
take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence the
infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has late
in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding one
which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table.

A matter for despair as regards bad butter is that at the tables where
it is used it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every other
kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread, which
fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beefsteak, which proves
virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in vegetable
diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting the
innocence of early peas,--it is in the corn, in the suc