butter!

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Silky, sweet and creamy; butter has the ability to transform a dish. Butter can bridge flavors, mellow and thicken a sauce or soup and add an unmistakable rich nutty flavor. Eaten for centuries, even used as currency in some cultures butter is delicious. Now you must understand the way you may put a slice of cheddar on a cracker is about the amount of butter I would put on a cracker. As a child, when my mother switched to margarine, I used my allowance to buy my own butter. This is serious! These days the science of fats has shown butter to best by far and margarine to be a detriment to your health. Yes, I am a butter addict and I admit it. No 12 step program needed, thank you.

Maybe it was grade school when I got hooked on butter. I remember making butter in Mrs. Kennedy’s class and spreading it on just baked bread. Perhaps it was my interest in baking, one of the first desserts I made and a favorite being boterkoek from Holland from the Small World cookbook. I’m fairly certain that translates into butter cake!

Whether you call it butter, ghee, or smen, make it from fresh, sour or fermented cream, or use it for basting, finishing or just slather on bread one thing is certain, butter is praised world side. Ancient crocks have been unearthed revealing fermented butter, fermentation being used as a method of preservation and still popular in North Africa. Europeans prefer butter made from cultured, slightly fermented cream over the sweet cream butter made of fresh cream, preferred by Brits and Americans. A cultured or European butter is better used in a sweet dessert while a sweet cream American butter is better for finishing a sauce.

One of the first things I ever made.

On a summer trip to England with a client I was lucky enough to have a Saintsbury’s market nearby which had an enormous array of butter from all over Europe, the UK, Africa even as far away as New Zealand. Seeing as these countries are all former British territories or occupied by the “Empire” at one point in time so I can see how butter came to come from so far away. I was in heaven. Each trip I would pick up a few different packets of butters and taste test. Some were sour or sweet, others tart or salty and some grassy or fresh milk tasting. I finally settled on beurre de bretagne, I couldn’t’ resist the crunch of the fleur de sel.

During my stay I took a side trip to Ireland, the Mecca of butter. Kerrygold, created by the Irish Dairy Board in 1961, just happens to be my go to butter for nearly everything calling for butter. It’s a gorgeous yellow, naturally colored and sweetened by the diet of the all grass-feed dairy cows, and it’s a bit salty. Salt or salt water, was a common preservative used in the early years of butter export. Although it is Scandinavia that holds the record for begin the earliest exporters, dating back to the 12th century. Ireland lead the world with the largest butter market up until the end of the 19th century. Ireland controlled the world butter market and it was the most important commodity traded in Cork, putting Cork on the map in the late 1796, when The Butter Exchange was built, now the site of The Cork Butter Museum, which I had the opportunity to visit. There I saw “bog butter,” a tub of butter over a 1000 years old, it had been buried in peat by a river as a means of preservation. Thank goodness they invented refrigeration.

“what butter and whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for”
– Irish proverb

Although butter can be traced back to ancient times, culinary historians is still debating the origins of one of my favorite uses of butter.  Pound Cake. Over the years I have made countless pound cakes, always testing and tweaking, for my favorite gluten and dairy free poundcake, click here.

Did you know?
The craft of making butter and cheese was woman’s work in the 1600’s
Butter making can be traced back to Mesopotamia, in 8,000 BC
In the middle ages butter was peasants food
American’s first butter factory was in New York state
Tibet’s butter tea, po cha, is made with fermented butter.

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