I was cleaning out a kitchen drawer at my mother’s house today when I ran across a treasure that had been misplaced for over 30 years!

You would not believe how I have grieved over this little piece of wood. My grandmother milked a jersey cow well up into the 1960s. She churned and made butter every week.

Nanny would spread newspapers on the kitchen floor and put her blue stoneware churn in the center. Taking her seat in her mother’s old ladder back chair, she would churn and churn. I can still hear her singing with each stoke of the dasher…”long white robes keep dragging along, churn em down, churn em down.”

When the golden flecks of butter started to form along the dasher handle, she would let me take a turn. I really felt like I was helping, but looking back on it now, I realize the butter was already made by the time I got my “turn.”

Nanny’s method of churning butter was quite different from what I see posted today. Rather than just churn the cream, she waited until the cream rose to the top of the milk, and she churned milk and all.

When the butter had formed, she would scoop it out of the milk onto a saucer and take this little paddle and start to work the butter into a mound, pressing and shaping, squeezing out the droplets of milk. When she finished, she would have a little beehive mound of butter. Taking a butter knife, she would go around and around the mound with the rounded tip of the knife, making little indentations for decoration. She said the leftover milk was the “buttermilk.”

I have wondered often what became of her little butter paddle. I moved into her old farmhouse in 1998, and it was missing from the kitchen. When I found it today, I was elated! To me and only me, it is a priceless treasure.