Milk was neither pasteurized nor homogenized.  What do these two words mean?  Some germs can be found in some milk.  Heating milk to ultra-high-temperature (138 to 150 degrees centigrade) destroys these germs and prolongs the period of time before fresh milk spoils.  Farmers did not have the means to pasteurize.  

If you let fresh milk sit the cream or butter fat in the milk will rise to the top.  Homogenize means to  break up the molecules of this fat into tiny pieces so that they remain suspended in the milk.  Farmers did not have the means to do that.

Today, dairy farmers sell their milk to a dairy or milk processing company that routinely pasteurizes and homogenizes milk.  Milk in a store must be both homogenized and pasteurized.  But there are many farmers even today who have a cow or two who retain the milk as it comes from the cow for their own consumption.

Pasteurization was developed by Louis Pasteur in the middle 1880s.  Homogenization is much more recent, perhaps in the early 1940s.  Before the 1940s milk in a store had to be shaken in the bottle by hand to mix the cream which had risen to the top with the rest of the milk in the bottle.

About 1895 the cream separator described in an earlier note came into wide use.  Before that cream was hand skimmed from a container of milk for use to make butter, and to a much less use in ice cream or whipped to place on deserts.  The cream separator changed all that to make removal of the cream much more efficient.

When I lived on Needham street in Coleman, Texas there was a farmer with a small farm with a half-dozen cows who lived about ½ mile from us.  We would sometimes take a pail there to buy milk from him.  This was not often as it was during the Great Depression.  When we visited my Grandfather Bilbrey on his farm we sometimes brought milk home.

Un-homoginized un-pasteurized milk would turn into curds and whey which we called clabber.  Sometimes we would eat it plain.  Once in a while we might put a little sugar on it before eating it.  Clabber strained would result in cottage cheese.  Today the milk you get in a store just sours.  It does not turn into clabber.

If milk as it comes from the cow is left to sit for a little while the cream rises to the top.  You could then hand skim the cream from the top.  After the farmer acquired a cream separator, the cream was separated from the milk that way.

I have mentioned that the cream would be made into butter.  The cream would be placed in a churn.  The churn had a dasher.  The churn was just a large crock.  In some churns the dasher could be turned around and around.  In others, the dasher would be pulled and pushed up and down.  Both methods were by hand.  If you had a small amount of cream you could just put in a jar and shake it.  In any method after a while the cream particles would adhere to each other and become butter.  This was just a mound.  Not like the sticks you now buy in a store.

I remember as a little boy my grandmother would let me churn.  After the butter was made there would be some liquid left.  This was called buttermilk and was commonly drunk.  Today buttermilk is chemically made and its taste is far inferior to fresh farm made buttermilk.

If you lived in town you might have a milk man deliver milk.  You would have a sign in the window indicating how many quarts you wanted.  Milk always came in quart size glass bottles then.  You washed out the empty bottles so the milk man could pick them up and return them to the dairy or milk processor for reuse.

Of course moving the bottles around made a noise.  The milk was had a wire carrier that would hold six quart size bottles.  During World War II many people worked the night shift.  They would get to sleep perhaps at one or two in the morning.  The milk man would begin his route about 6:00 a.m.  During the War there was a song “Milk Man Keep Those Bottles Quiet.”  I remember as late as the middle 1960s some milkmen still used a horse and wagon but some drove trucks.  Now there are no more milkmen.  You have to go to a store.  Back then the milkman might also deliver butter and eggs.  Almost all milk today is sold in cardboard containers.