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North/Central Europe: How To Make Butter and Buttermilk From Scratch

Please note: this article is about making real buttermilk and butter at home. If you're not interested in the butter, and only want a buttermilk substitute to bake with, please check this article about making and keeping a buttermilk plant or artificial buttermilk substitute. For more general information on buttermilk, please click here.

North/Central Europe: Information on Buttermilk

What is buttermilk? Where does buttermilk come from?

Natural buttermilk is a product of the butter-making process. After a cow is milked, the cream is removed from the milk by either allowing it to rise to the top and then pouring it off, or using a mechanical device like a cream centrifuge to remove it. The cream is then churned or mixed vigorously so that the butterfat molecules gather together in bigger and bigger lumps. When the lumps of butter are finally removed, the liquid that remains is buttermilk.

Ireland: Porter Cake (March 13, 2008)

Porter was (and is) a style of dark beer which began to be brewed in England and Ireland in the mid-1700's. The stout style now exemplified by Guinness was closely linked to it: indeed, Guinness was originally marketed as a porter before having its name changed to "Extra Stout". The only porter being brewed in Ireland now, however, is the "Plain" porter (as in the famous line from Flann O' Brien's "The Workman's Friend", A pint of plain is your only man) that comes from the Porterhouse group of brewpubs in Dublin. (For more information about the intertwined history of porter and stout, see the Porter pages at Wikipedia and the BeerAdvocate website.)

Somewhere along the line in the 1800's, it occurred to somebody in Ireland that porter would make a good addition to the robust dark flavor of the standard fruitcake: and so porter cake was born. It usually contains, at the very least, raisins or sultanas (golden raisins): often dried candied peel (orange peel, lemon peel, candied pineapple, etc.), and sometimes even glacé cherries, come into the recipe as well. All the alcohol in the porter is of course driven off during the long baking period, resulting in a darkly rich-tasting cake which is another great standby for those who like to wheel out a well-loaded tea trolley.

This cake keeps very well if stored in a cake tin.

Click "read more" for the recipe.

Ireland: Bread and Butter Pudding with Irish Whiskey (March 9, 2008)

The Irish climate is the kind in which you need comfort food every now and then, and this dessert is one of the best sorts.

Bread and butter pudding has a long association with childhood and the nursery in these islands. A century or so ago, bread and milk was a common suppertime or bedtime dish for children. Eventually someone got the idea of making it a little more special by baking it: and probably someone else later came up with the concept that such a very simple dish might be made more interesting by adding dried fruit, or fruit preparations like jam or marmalade. After that, especially where Irish cooks were concerned, when they started thinking about tinkering with this old favorite from their past, it was probably only a matter of time before the whiskey arrived.

Just a note: probably it's not a good idea to make this with too lightly flavored a whiskey. EuroCuisineGuy (whose specialty is this kind of assessment) recommends Jameson's, Paddy's or Black Bush as whiskeys that would be able to stand up to the other ingredients and the baking process without being too aggressive. Lighter-flavored ones like Powers' or plain Bushmills are more likely to get lost in the shuffle.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.

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