The Chemistry of Cookery

even as butter, is made with so much regard to care and cleanliness, or with such comparatively unobjectionable materials. The demand for oleomargarine, which constitutes about 60 per cent. of the mass that is churned, has naturally raised its price, and various substitutes have been tried with more or less success. Lard has been extensively used, and is said to answer fairly well. Oils of various kinds have also had their trial, but used alone their melting point is too low. Earth-nut oil is used in small quantities by some makers in order to impart an agreeable flavour, especially in cases where the artificial butter has been “weighted” by the addition of water to the milk, or meal to an inferior oil. ‘The adaptation of M. Mège’s process to the imitation of other dairy products is a natural sequence to the success, in a commercial sense, which has attended the manufacture of artificial butter. The skim-milk difficulty in the American butter factories has set their managers to work at the problem of its conversion into something saleable for some time past. This difficulty has been increased of late years by the invention of the cream separator, which deprives the milk of practically all its cream; but on the large dairy farms of Denmark, where from 100 to 300 cows are kept and these separators are used, the skim-milk is made into skim-cheese, and the working classes in that country do not object to eat a nutritious article of diet which they can buy at about fourpence per pound. But neither the American nor the English labourer, as a general rule, likes a cheese that is at the same time exceedingly poor in fat and excessively hard to bite. ‘Obviously the first step was to add fat to the skim-milk so as to replace the cream which had been taken off. This, however, was no easy matter, for neither oleomargarine nor lard would mix with the skim-milk when directly applied. The imitation cheese attempted to be made in this way was wretchedly bad; and, when cut, the added fatty matter was