and more easily seen in raw milk than in pasteurized milk and its absence is not always a sure sign of lack of richness or purity of the milk. By cooling the milk thoroughly so that it will keep, almost all the cream will be at the top in forty-eight hours and can be skimmed off. The cream can be used for coffee or on cereals or fruits or puddings; the skim milk left will still hold 1/2% or more of butter-fat and can be used to drink or for cooking.
The Separator.—On the farm or in the creamery the
cream is no longer raised by gravity, that is, by letting
the milk "set" either in shallow pans on the kitchen
shelf or in deep cans in ice water, but the fresh, warm
milk is run through the separator in a continuous
stream.
An image should appear at this position in the text. To use the entire page scan as a placeholder, edit this page and replace "{{missing image}}" with "{{raw image|The story of milk.djvu/72}}". Otherwise, if you are able to provide the image then please do so. For guidance, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images. |
Early conception of the separator
It was noticed that the rising of the cream due to the difference in specific gravity between the butter-fat and the milk-"serum" (the watery solution of the other constituents) might be greatly hastened by subjecting the milk to centrifugal force. This physical phenomenon was taken advantage of in the first conception of the separator where it was shown that if a pail of milk was whirled around like a stone in a sling the heavier milk-serum would be thrown towards the bottom of the separator pail with so much greater force than the lighter cream (butter-fat mixed with a small part of the serum) that the separation which would take 48 hours in the milk at rest, could be accomplished in a