When I was a Boy Scout, every year we would wildy anticipate the cool projects we would get to do for the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Would we build a tower out of timber? A rope bridge? Arrow shooting demonstration? Nope, all we ever got to do was make butter. Every frickin’ year. So, to answer the question, it takes for fuckin’ ever to shake cream into butter when everybody else is out having fun doing cool stuff.
I hate butter.
Well, whatever the hell it was, I ate a whole box of Wheat Thins with it. 
Yeah, we did this once. I remember that between me and my sibs and my mother and my aunts we kept the churn going all day for enough butter to put on some biscuits. We decided to stick to Parkay in the future. (The butter was good though; I still buy handchurned butter at Farmer’s Markets once in a while [though their idea of hand-churned is actually cheating a bit].)
Well, dang, looks like you’re right! At least, all that’s in this recipe is cream and buttermilk and time and heat. Sounds possible to do all that with a paddle and friction.
All right, so what I want to know is, why is homemade butter so much better than store-bought? Butter seems like a pretty simple concept, so what are the big commercial makers doing to screw it up?
My first guess is simply that it’s stale. Butter is pretty long-lived, but it’s not indestructible, and fresh butter the day you make it is better than butter a month old.
Fewer preservatives and additives, plus a certain “fresh” taste (especially when it goes from udder to table in less than a day).
Much like (I can only imagine) Zoe and a few others above, I read the beginning of this thread with my jaw dropped. Butter making as a novelty? Pah!
Then I realized, not too many city kids have access to a cow. And hate milking the damned things, and hate cleaning the cream separator even more than milking.
Oh, and the churn most often used 'round our parts was metal, with the crank on the side. I’ll see if I can find a picture before the edit window closes.
In a museum once I saw a churn that was operated by a dog on a treadmill. I don’t think they ever caught on, but the principal was interesting.
My aunts (born 1889) had buttermolds with floral designs and one with a bee design. The latter was used (before my time) for making honey sweetened butter. (Trivia: butter was one of the most popular small trade items to the local Indians here; it was usually traded by housewives [for obviously it’s not very transportable or longlived in hot climates] for meat/corn/beans/fur.)
Too late, but:
http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/Museum/metalware/general/stroud.htm
http://www.rjorgensen.com/antiques/misc._and_accessories/A7808.html
Only, grey metal. I believe it was from the 19th century.
We ate some of our fresh butter with home-grown artichokes last night. Yum.
Oh, they were used. IIRC, my old man’s family had one when he was a kid. Unfortunately, the dog was smart, and ran away as soon as he saw the churn come out.
If you want to try and make a simple farmers cheese, all you need is yogurt, some cheesecloth, a sieve with hangers and a deep bowl or pot.
If you want to flavor your own cheese, buy plain yogurt. Hang the sieve from the bowl or pot. Fold the cheese cloth about three times and cover the sieve so that the cloth hangs over the edges. Put the yogurt into the sieve, then put the whole mess into the fridgedaire overnight, or eight hours or so. Make sure that the sieve never touches the resulting whey, hence the deep bowl.
Next morning, gently squeeze any remaining fluid from what used to be yogurt and use like cream cheese. Flavor with herbs or whatever.
Use a flavored yogurt and you can make fantastic frozen yogurt treats for your kids.
Cheap and easy.
T.