Butter and Milk
European housewives and enslaved women doubled as dairymaids, churning, washing, and molding fresh butter. Many enslaved people brought herding and dairying skills from Africa, where cows were first domesticated. Early colonists brought the British-bred Milking Devon cow here for its high-fat milk. Fine, clean butter was prized—not only as food, but for trade, often showing up in store receipts and barter records.
Indigenous people kept no domestic animals, but nuts played a similar role in their diet. Hickory trees (much more common than today) dropped basket loads of nuts onto the forest floor each fall. Esopus people made them into nut milk by pulverizing nuts, shells and all, and simmering them in liquid—the nutshell fragments sank, and the milk was poured off. Esopus cooks also pounded nuts to a creamy paste to stir into stews.
Cows in a Meadow, mid-17th century
Attributed to Paulus Potter (Dutch, 1625-1654)
Oil on panel
HHS Permanent Collection, gift of the George H. Way Collection, Staten Island, New York
Cows, sheep, and other domestic animals appear prominently in all of Paulus Potter’s paintings, usually in small groups silhouetted against romantic, cloudy skies. His paintings appear in many major museums in the U.S. and Europe, including the monumental work, “The Young Bull,” in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Butter was a form of currency, valued as if it were cash. Roelof Elting, who kept a store here in New Paltz in the late 1700s, accepted payment in butter, as well as cash, beeswax, and nuts.