BUTTER FOREVER, TOGETHER

Byron Houdayer on the magic of butter for the first issue of The Sunday Paper.

Like poetry, butter comes in many forms. Of the many benefits of growing up between two cultures, none is more delightful than the duality of butter culture. Butter makes my Franco-German heart beat like a phone book in a washer dryer. Whether served in the Teutonic fashion as a substantial marble slab on knotted lye bread, or just across the Rhine, where it melts down vegetable grooves into golden pools. My lifelong love story with butter has come to the point where my mind reduces most foodstuffs to their capacity to convey butter, solid or melted.

Butter has found many uses since it was first accidentally shaken into the world on the back of a journeying ass. The Gauls cleaned themselves with it and the Egyptians, their dead. The Romans cured their sick with it while others appeased their gourmand gods – all a far cry from today’s comparably banal uses.

Much can be said for Europe being best divided across its butter and oil fault line rather than its national borders. This is not new – 400 BC Greek poet Anaxandrides referred to the barbarian Thracians as wild-haired Boutyrophagoi (butter-eaters) to highlight their vulgarity – words surely chosen for their alliteration, as everyone knows that real barbarians eat margarine. To choose margarine over butter is to commit oneself to a fork in a world of soup. It slaps creation in the face. The invention of the dreaded, insipidly uninspiring Margarine as a butter substitute for the poor may well be the most consequential failure of Napoleon III’s mediocre reign.

When Lent forbids something, it is usually worth a try. Butter is no exception. In the 16th century, however, in its delightful necessity, this privation was too much for some and a butter tithe was introduced for those who could not forgo it. This eventually financed the Tour de Beurre of the Cathedral of Rouen. Not bad for a spread – for the reconstruction of St Peter’s Basilica one got nothing less than salvation in return. I find this to be an equivalent deal.

Most northern cooking is inconceivable without butter, at best uninspiring and at worst ascetically bland. It ennobles what it touches - it gilds rice, glazes peas and transforms the puritan heft of mashed potatoes into malleable ambrosia. Who can think of a more graceful condiment? Bourdain attributes the richer taste of restaurant cooking entirely to the profligate use of butter – a more welcome secret ingredient than it was in Last Tango In Paris. No doubt Dutch still-lifes would lose their acclaim without the morbid luster of butter-shone surfaces catching the pale northern light.

Everybody’s nostalgia madeleine, nothing calms the heart and lifts the spirits like a cool slab of butter, roughly spread on freshly torn, warm crusty bread. This joyful anodyne collapses, in a simple moment, our complex culinary history.