A Hand-Cranked Butter Churn
Paul Snizek shares how they made butter during the World War II using a homemade machine, a wooden hand-cranked churn.
July/August 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
As I was looking through MOTHER's General Store Catalogue No. 4, I came to page 14 and noticed the electric butter churn and the footnote on the hand-cranked device. Boy, that took me back about 25 years!
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I was born in Czechoslovakia, and all through World War II we used a wooden hand-cranked churn. The reason was that the modern machines had to be handed in so we couldn't make butter (the Reich needed all the cream). Fortunately, our old-fashioned gadget was quiet and the S.S. troops patrolling the area didn't hear any noise from the attic. So we sat there and turned and turned and listened to the "slosh-slop" until the beautiful hour when the butter was ready to be taken out and the buttermilk ready for drinking.
In case anyone's interested, I'll try to describe the homemade machine we used. I was only nine when the war ended, I admit, and my memory of the dimensions isn't quite what it should be. Maybe some other old-timers can remember better or improve on my instructions. Possibly my plans are no good, but here goes anyway!
The whole thing looked like a drum about two feet in diameter and about a foot deep, and rested on a support of 4 X 4's with some cross bracing to make it steady. Into the side was cut a six-inch-square hole through which the milk was poured in and the butter taken out. The plug which fitted into this opening was tapered, with the wider part outside, and we kept a clean cloth handy to put over the hole before pushing the stopper in.
The flat surfaces of the drum each had a square hole in the center through which a square axle was pushed.
