The diet of the Siberian Germans who moved from the Volga region was based on flour, meat and dairy products, as well as potatoes. Traditional dishes included chicken noodles, soup with dumplings, sausage, goose with cabbage, and strudel. Milk, mostly cow’s, was an important source of nutrition for Germans.

Milk processing in German villages was highly developed. Milk was used to produce sour cream, butter, curdled milk, baked yogurt, curd and cheese. Russians commonly used butter with a high fat content, whereas Siberian Germans preferred the product with a small amount of milk fat, as well as with the addition of vegetable fats.

In German cuisine butter was consumed more as spread on bread; along with jam and cottage cheese, such spreads were referred to as Brotaufstrich, which means “mass spread on bread”. In Russian cuisine, butter was more often used for cooking various dishes. Siberia, thanks in part to Russian Germans, was famous for its butter production at the beginning of the 20th century. It was one of the largest centers of butter making, the second exporter of the product after Denmark.

The cost of butter that was exported from the region along the Trans-Siberian railroad was higher than the cost of all mining products and higher than the cost of the average annual gold production of the entire empire. Siberian butter was eaten by the whole world. Before the First World War, more than 5 million poods of this product, that is about 82000 tons, were exported annually from Siberia. Butter was produced on an industrial scale from the end of the 19th century, although it continued to be produced in private peasant farms.

The collection of the Omsk Museum contains various butter churns, separators and special molds for pre-packing butter. This particular mold, consists of a wooden frame and a lid. The latter was a kind of stamp used to mark a piece of butter before it was sold.

On the perimeter of the lid, there is a carved pattern of oblique incisions, and in the center — an image of a twig. The mold was handmade approximately in the 1950s in the village of Zameletenovka, Omsk region. It was donated to the museum in 1995.