The Cambridgeshire salt-butter is held in the highest esteem. And the London checsemongers, by washing and detaching the salt from it, often sell it at a high price for fresh butter. It is made nearly in the same way as the Epping butter, and when salted, put up in firkins of 56 pounds. Yorkshire and Suffolk butter is very little inferior to that of Cambridgeshire, and is often sold in London for such. Utoxeter, in Staffordshire, has long been famous for good butter. The London cheesemon n.crs have a sort of factory there for this article. It is bought by the pot, of a cylindrical form, weighing 14 pounds.
The superior excellence of the butter produced in the Highland districts of Scotland, has been already remark ed, and we hope accounted for. The same delicately flavoured species is said to be made on the mountains of Wales, and the heaths and commons of England. Whe ther the same reason will apply here, we have no means of ascertaining.
Frauds and abuses of various kinds are practised in the salting and packing of butter, to increase its bulk and weight. Pots are frequently laid with good butter for a little way at the top, and with bad at the bottom. Sometimes the butter is placed in upright rolls, touch ing one another above, so as to form a uniform surface, but receding so as to leave empty spaces below. Some times tallow or hogs-lard is found to constitute no small proportion of what the purchaser had deemed good but te•. To prevent these cheats, the factors at Utoxeter
keep a surveyor, who, in case of suspicion, tries the pots with an iron instrument, called a butter-bore.
An act of parliament (36th Geo. I l 1. c. 86.) particu larly regulates the packing, salting, and selling of but ter. By that statute it is enacted, that every vessel made for the packing of butter, shall be of good well-seasoned wood, marked with the maker's name, and, by a subse quent act, his place of abode ; that it shall be a tub con taining 84, a firkin containing 56, or a hall' firkin con taining 28 pounds, avoirdupois, and no other ; that it shall be of a particular weight, and neither top nor bottom ex ceeding a certain thickness, haying the true weight or tare of the vessel distinctly marked upon it ; with a va riety of other regulations to prevent frauds, under severe penalties. Any fraud with regard to the butter, the ves s.e1, or its marks, subjects the person concerned to forfeiture of :30/. for every such offence. Sec Four( ,to, Syeteme dee C911110188CIIICC8 Chinaques, tom ix. Di and Pariunntierr, Mt moire cur lc Thomson's Ch. ndstry. Anderson's Agricultural 1?ecreations, vol. arid iv. Anderson's Rs aye on Agriculture. Mid Lot/,an Report, 1795. (K)