[Food & Drink] Butter Up

by Jesse Yancy
Photo by Christi Vivar
March 26, 2008

Any kitchen’s larder should include butter among its basic oils: Without butter, cakes lose their savor, eggs can’t find their flavor, and breads just get lost.

Butter has no substitute; a chemist is just no match for a cow. Butter owes its decline as a kitchen staple to its high saturated fat content. Julia Child once declared (Julia rarely simply “said” anything), “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream,” which makes you wonder if she was talking about cooking at all. She wasn’t. She was talking about taste, which is an altogether different matter. Julia died in 2004, two days short of her 92nd birthday. I’ll bet she never nicked a stick of Blue Bonnet in her life.

Most butters (there are many types and grades) are yellowish because of beta carotene, the same nutrient that gives most sweet potatoes an orange coloration, along with winter squash and, of course, carrots. My first taste of homemade butter was in the kitchen of a boyhood friend, Dean Wright, whose family owned a farm on the edge of town. The butter was almost chalky-white. The Wrights’ cows didn’t eat much carotene, but they lactated, nonetheless, and Dean’s family made good use of fresh, whole milk, cream and pale, pure butter.

Margarine, the earliest version of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, made its dubious debut in 1896. Louis Napoleon, arguably the dimmest bulb on his Euro-trash family tree, remembered (or was probably reminded of) his uncle’s observation, “Une armée marche à son estomac” (loosely, “an army marches on its stomach”). So he offered a prize for a butter substitute that would be “suitable for use by the armed forces and the lower classes.”

To paraphrase an earlier French ruler: “Let them eat Country Crock.”

Louis awarded the prize to the happily named Hippolyte Mège-Mourié. The ensuing Franco-Prussian War ended 18 months later, shortly after the men from Berlin reduced Parisians to paying premium prices for plump vermin. Margarine probably helped make cats Shanghaied from the Left Bank more palatable, but long after the armistice, this artificial butter— like the Second Empire itself— remains a blot on France’s lilied escutcheon.

But nowadays margarine, once a means for upper-class French to reserve the best for themselves, has taken a demographic volte-face. Thanks to nutrition Nazis and Madison Avenue, butter rates about the same as a heart-stopping Colt .45. As a result, margarine finds its way into the “butter” compartments of affluent refrigerators all over the place, where it performs its most essential function: taking up space. The fact of the matter is, many brands of margarine contain saturated fats due to hydrogenating processes that enable vegetable oils to remain solid.

As a final shot in this vein, let’s tote out the infamous French paradox, which casts light on the low incidence of heart disease among the French despite the fact that they eat a lot of saturated fats. The French paradox has oh-so-aptly led to the promotion of wine as a health food, an endorsement that covers a multitude of sins.

Margarine as a spread insults any honest piece of bread. Either butter or olive oil makes much more sense. If you cook with margarine, you shouldn’t; given its high water content, it’s just a bad idea. Butter, on the other hand, is essential in too many recipes to recount. A final swirl of butter adds gloss and aroma to a sauce, it browns nicely on broiled fish, and potatoes beg for it. Here’s a very simple recipe that unites butter with its cousin, cheese, in a great way.


Cheese Biscuits
Take two sticks of butter, two cups of sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated, and enough plain flour to make a stiff dough. Cayenne is a nice touch (and I do mean touch). Chill for an hour; roll out to about a half an inch thick and cut into small rounds or squares. Bake on a cookie sheet at 325 degrees until dry but not browned.