Butter moulds and stamps were popular during the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, being used to create attractive table decorations in private homes and to identify farm produce for sale.
Una Jessie Bell née Bailey donated these decorated butter stamps to the Young Historical Museum in the 1960s.
Butter stamps are made of a close-grained hardwood, such as lime, holly or sycamore.
The pictured butter stamps were a two-piece ‘ejector’ stamp, where the design was on the disc of wood with a handle.
This pushed the butter out of a cylinder of wood.
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The decoration was carved into the stamp in reverse, so it would come out the correct way around when the butter was turned out onto a cabbage leaf for wrapping, or straight onto a butter dish.
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, of 1861, was a guide to running a household in Victorian Britain.
The editor, Isabella Beeton, noted that: ‘Butter may be shaped without the aid of moulds, but round butter moulds or wooden stamps are much used and are made in a variety of patterns. They should be kept scrupulously clean and, before the butter is pressed in, the moulds should be scalded, and afterwards soaked well in cold water. The butter at once takes the impress of the mould, and may therefore be turnout immediately into the butter dish’.
Una, when she donated these butter stamps, said they belonged to her great-grandmother.
One possible candidate in her family tree is Ellen Delmich or Delwich (1812-1884), who was born in Cork, Ireland, and arrived in Port Phillip on the ship James Pattinson as a free settler on Thursday 11th February 1836. Later that year, she married Samuel Taylor at Sutton Forest.
Ellen died, aged 71, in Bungendore.
Butter was primarily made by women in the home until the 1880s in Ireland.
It was often sold directly by its maker to her neighbours, or on the streets in open markets, or sometimes sold to regulated city butter markets, such as the Cork Butter Market which exported butter all over the world between the 1770s and 1925.
Making and selling butter may have given Ellen enough income to emigrate to Australia on her own.
Butter-making was often passed down in families.
Samuel and Ellen’s daughter, Charlotte, married George Stanley Bailey in 1864.
They lived at Lake George before selecting land at Thuddungra in 1883.
Charlotte died, aged 94, in Young in 1933.
Her son, Samuel George Bailey, married Catherine Howell in 1904.
‘Mrs S. Bailey’ (Catherine) was awarded for her ‘keg butter or salted butter for keeping’ at the 1924 Young Pastoral and Agricultural Association Show and was awarded again in 1928.
Catherine was Una’s mother.
Karen Schamberger - Young Historical Society.
