Hey there,
I’m back.
After four months traveling through Scotland, Poland, and Spain, I landed back in the US last week. The Eats History Project has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, and I am already itching to go back on the road, but November and December belong to holiday content, historical recipes, the cozy kind of cooking videos that make sense when it is cold outside and you want something warming on your screen. That is what is coming.
But first, butter.
This week I made homemade butter from scratch.
The method I used is actually the traditional pre-refrigeration technique that every household used before modern dairy farming changed everything. Before refrigeration, cream sat for several days between milkings and fermented naturally. The butter that came out of that cream was what we now call cultured butter, tangier and more complex than the standard sweet cream butter most Americans eat today. I replicated that process by mixing heavy cream with a spoonful of yogurt, leaving it to ferment at room temperature for about eight hours, then churning it with a hand mixer until the fat separated from the buttermilk.
The transformation is genuinely satisfying to watch. Whipped cream, then thick and grainy, then suddenly a scrambled-egg yellow mass forms and the buttermilk releases all at once. You pour off the buttermilk (save it, it is better than anything sold commercially as buttermilk), then wash the butter through several changes of ice cold water until it runs completely clear, squeeze out the excess liquid, salt it, and shape it.
The butter is excellent. Richer and more flavourful than supermarket butter, with a faint lactic tang from the fermentation that makes it genuinely special on good bread.
And here’s a quick reminder…
Cooking Ancient Rome is available for preorder now. It is my debut cookbook, coming from Ten Speed Press and Penguin Random House in Spring 2027, and it is the most ambitious thing I have worked on. If you have been following along through the Eats History, you already know how much the Roman recipes run through everything I do. The preorder link is in my bio and on the website.
Click the Photo for the Link!
Until then, my friends:
Keep cooking, keep traveling, & keep learning.
-Donnie