Comparison of Woods for Butter Boxes

In the aftermath of the Great War, American industry faced a pressing problem: spruce, the traditional wood for butter containers, had become scarce and expensive. Grover Dean Turnbow, writing in 1923, set out to find alternatives. His solution was a rigorously scientific taste test. This small but meticulous study compared three woods - white fir, cottonwood, and spruce - as materials for butter storage. Turnbow didn't merely examine structural suitability; he conducted blind taste tests over six months of storage, scoring each sample for flavor. The results challenged conventional wisdom: properly seasoned and treated cottonwood boxes produced butter that scored slightly higher than spruce, while white fir performed nearly as well when paraffined and lined with parchment. What emerges is a window into early 20th-century food science, where chemists and dairymen collaborated to solve industrial problems with empirical rigor. Turnbow's work offers a glimpse into the hidden history of food packaging - shaped by wartime economics, material science, and the subtle chemistry of wood and cream. For anyone curious about food industry origins or the overlooked science of everyday objects, this brief monograph is a charming time capsule.