The Complete Servant: Being a Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of All Descriptions of Servants (1825)
A collection of 19th century butter molds
A book entitled Essays on the Management of the Dairy (1817) gives us some insight into why Epping butter is “the best”:
This book also has some helpful information about the packaging, distribution and sale of the butter if you are interested in doing a deep dive about butter in the 19th century. Epping was likely also popular due to its relative proximity to London, and apparently “good pastures and a high standard of cleanliness in their dairies” which attributed to high prices and demand of their butter (https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol5/pp127-132). Epping was also well known for pork and sausages.
A home farm on grand estates may have had their own dairy, but in London most of these farm products were purchased at market. However, during the 19th century considerable efforts and strides in creaming and buttermaking equipment, beyond the traditional wooden churn, was made including the barrel churn (The Butter Industry, 1925). Butter in factories would begin to, along with many other products, be produced around the middle of the 19th century.
