MARIËTTE’S STORY
Not often does one come across a present-day product which is positioned against a befitting backdrop as Spitskop Botter is. This backdrop consists of a painting done with words in which Maruis’s mother – Mariëtte – takes the reader back to her childhood days in the 1940s when she helped her mother to make butter on their farm in the Hex River Valley, De Doorns.
From there she takes the reader to the farm Voetpad in the Karoo where she, as a young bride, followed in her mother-in-law’s footsteps when she started to make butter from the milk produced by the farm’s Jersey stud. In her story she gives detail of the dos and don’ts from how to work with the cows, to the way in which to store cream in the refrigerator. She tells about the equipment they used (now used by Maruis…), about summer butter and winter butter, even about keeping the cream close to the Aga stove in the farm kitchen on those very cold days to make sure it ripens for the butter-making process.
She refers to the South African Railway bus which collected the butter from the farm, makes mention of Graaff-Reinet Fischeries which sold her butter for (only!) two shillings and six pennies per pound, and tells how the man at the dairy in Port Elizabeth explained to her his non-scientific way of grading the cream delivered to them – scoop it with the finger from the can and lick the cream off to taste it!
Click below to read Mariëtte’s delightful story, written in Afrikaans and in her own handwriting!
