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Updated: September 29, 2025
My mother made most of the butter for nearly forty years, packing thousands of tubs and firkins of it in that time. The milk was set in tin pans on a rack in the milk house for the cream to rise, and as soon as the milk clabbered it was skimmed.
The decimal measures below the gallon would correspond of course with the weights, as it is decided by the act, that a gallon is to contain ten pounds of water. The measures above gallons, it is proposed to call firkins and butts. It is taken for granted that quarts and pints, as well as half-pounds and quarter-pounds, would still be continued in use.
Ghost of Maecenas! hide thy blushing face! They took him from the sickle and the plough To guage ale firkins! O, for shame return!
The two-horse pung or the single-horse pod, shod with steel shoes an inch thick, was closely packed with the accumulated farm wealth whole pigs, perhaps a deer or two, firkins of butter, casks of cheese, four cheeses in each cask, bags of beans, pease or corn, skins of mink, fox, and fisher-cat that the boys had trapped, birch brooms that the boys had made, yarn that their sisters had spun, and stockings and mittens that they had knitted in short, anything that a New England farm could produce that would sell to any profit in a New England town.
"Ninety-five firkins fourteen gallons three quarts. You see, it's quite simple," said Mr. Cleghorn, the arithmetic master.
Up with the calabash, I say, and let the merry men who carry these firkins, which are to supply the wine cup with their life blood, be chosen with regard to their state of steadiness. Their burden is weighty and precious, and if the fault is not in our eyes, they seem to us to reel and stagger more than were desirable. Now, move on, sirs, and let our minstrels blow their blythest and boldest."
I pushed my way through a group of enthusiastic patriots many of them in that condition once described to me by a sporting curate as "holding two or three firkins apiece" who crowded round me, fired with a desire to drink success to the British Constitution a rash shibboleth, by the way, for gentlemen in their situation to attempt to enunciate at all at my expense, and hastened upstairs to our wing.
If you put lard in stone or earthen jars, it should be cooled first, as there is danger of their cracking, white oak firkins with iron hoops, and covers to fit tight, are good to keep lard, and if taken care of will last for twenty years. The fat that has the skin on should be cut very fine, taking the skin off first.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest veneration for all these things.
No domestic articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence the infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has late in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding one which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table.
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