With only memory to guide her, our fearless reporter makes her own butter 

Childhood memories are funny things—all at once accurate in detail, but way off in terms of scope. You may remember the precise tangy aroma of the grilled cheese and tomato soup that magically appeared on your tray after Sesame Street, but the time your mother spent preparing it is completely gone. It was with this skewing of the facts in mind that I contemplated recreating a favourite childhood meal, entirely from what was likely a highly selective memory.
I have wonderful recollections of Sunday morning breakfast with my family and friends, delicious from-scratch meals featuring freshly-made butter slathered on my mother’s buttermilk pancakes. We bought our milk from a nearby farm (which I remember purely for the kittens in the barn—yet another example of childhood filtering) and skimmed the cream from the top, putting it aside for just these occasions. Memory told me that you shake the jar of cream for a few minutes and next thing you know—presto!—you have butter. Suspecting it couldn’t really be that easy, I decided to invite a few friends over and take a run at it myself, 30 years later and sans parental guidance.
Right, well. I was off the mark by a good 20 minutes, but to my credit, the cream-to-butter transitions did take place just as I remembered. We used Avalon Dairy’s Valley Pride organic whipping cream (30% m.f.), which I set out for a couple of hours, allowing it to reach room temperature. When the troops arrived we poured it into clean jars with tight-fitting lids, filling to three quarters full.  And then we began to shake it.
And shake it…
And shake it…
If you try this at home, you’ll want to have a few shakers on duty, as there is some passing-of-the-jar required in order to placate exhausted biceps.
The progress:
•    10 minutes—the cream was thick and began to coat the jar
•    20 minutes—the jar felt full, and upon removing the lid, we found the jar was stuffed to the brim with perfectly whipped cream
•    25 minutes—small particles were suspended in the thick whip
•    30 minutes—a large ball had formed, surrounded by thin, bluish buttermilk
As a kid, I always had a tough time believing it was actually going to happen, and even now I found myself wondering a little. It’s an impossible-seeming transformation, and no matter how many times you’ve experienced it, when you suddenly (okay, after 30 minutes) have a lump of yellow butter floating in the jar, it seems downright magical.
We put the buttermilk aside for the pancakes, placed the butter in a medium-sized bowl and rinsed it under cold water. We continued folding and pressing it with a rubber spatula, removing as much of the excess buttermilk as possible. (This is especially important if the butter is to be stored for any length of time, as any buttermilk left within the butter can cause it to sour quickly).  As we continued folding, droplets of milk escaped and the butter became thicker.
All was going according to plan. Whew. Once it wasn’t offering up any more beads of bluish milk, we added just a pinch of salt and put into a dish to wait patiently for its pancakes.
Any recipe for buttermilk pancakes can be used. This fresh buttermilk is much thinner than the cultured, store-bought variety, but it achieves the same fluffy result. We used a recipe that I coaxed out of my mother years ago—she never measured and so the first draft contained a lot of “I don’t know, maybe about a cup?” statements. I have made it a number of times since and have honed it to a more precise recipe that follows.
We topped them with fresh strawberries (growing our own would have extended the feeling of smug self-satisfaction) and a drizzle of pure maple syrup. The taste and texture were just as I recalled. A completely different experience from pancakes brought by a waitress, to be sure—and I think all of the diligent butter-shakers would agree that these babies come with one extra, unbeatable flavour: pride.
Butter yield: 500ml whipping cream made approximately 3/4 cup butter and 1 cup buttermilk.
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Bambi Edlund is a Vancouver designer, illustrator and writer with a profound love for the kitchen. She prefers the just-wing-it approach to cooking and tends to treat recipes as well-intentioned suggestions, resulting in both disaster and triumph.