Odes: Butter

A sleepover is always a visit to a foreign country. Sleeping bag in a snail-roll, passport in hand, you agree to cross over into a land where the language and the customs are different. Parents have different limits over there, they buy different snacks. There’s no way to find out except to experience it; your friend the native knows nothing else and cannot tell you what is strange. It’s all normal to them.

Returning from one such event, I remember telling my mother that I had a good time except for one thing.

“Mel’s dad made us breakfast this morning. Eggs and toast.”

“Oh, that’s good. Just like you have at home.”

“Yeah, except not.”

“How come?”

“Instead of butter, he put some kind of yellow stuff on the toast. Out of a big tub. Country Rock or something.”

I had no familiarity with margarine. Though my mother, like almost every other woman of her generation, dieted off and on her whole life, it was real butter or nothing around our house. I had pulled an over-easy egg on to my friend’s dad’s shitty white toast and busted the yolk like I always do, sunrise gold over Country Crock’s beta carotene yellow, and salted it. Biting in had been a form of betrayal I had never imagined. Margarine is palm and soybean oil suspended in water. On a hot slice of toast, those things separate and the toast is wet, sullied, and nearly inedible. But I am never rude to my host. I ate my eggs on toast and said thank you. But I never got over the deception of that which is not butter.

I can believe it’s not, child of the eighties though I am. Growing up in Europe, even on a military base, real butter was part of my every meal. My mother soft-boiled eggs and set them into cunning little cups she’d bought in Bavaria. I learned to slice their heads off with a butter knife, excavating the jammy yolk within with toast “soldiers;” strips of Halbweissbrot (literally half-white bread, made partly of whole wheat flour) liberally spread with Allgau grass-fed German butter. All of this sprinkled with salt from an antique cellar bought from some flea market, all of this a ritual to honor what the commercials on TV called a balanced breakfast.

My people butter their sandwiches, creating an insulating layer of fat between innocent bread and the moist tomatoes and lettuce that would ruin it with moisture before lunch time. To this day, I butter thinly before putting down mayo, a step that brings improbable richness to deli counter turkey or cold roast beef, a step that I sorely miss every time it is not taken. At a movie theater, I’ll accept the cultural approximation of butter-flavored oil, with its secretive reek of butyric acid sometimes overshooting the imitation and landing in hateful mockery with a whiff of vomit in the aftertaste. At home, I pop the kernels in coconut oil and top with Kerrygold, melted in the same pot and irreplaceable by anything uncultured, unreal. When I was in France I watched the way they apply butter to bread, even brioche, in a fat thick layer the way that I would cut a hard cheese. It looked like too much and it was not.

How could there ever be too much of a thing so angelic, so pure? Just a little sweet, just a little salty, and the absolute delicacy of suspended milkfat that melts on the tongue like a promise to kiss a close friend on their sixteenth birthday. My grandfather used to butter saltines in his old age. He’d lay a sardine across the scraped and salted surface of a Zesta, tasting the granary, the dairy, the sea. The first time he handed me one, I didn’t understand the rules. Wasn’t the tiny fish still filled with bones? I watched him, expecting him to interrupt his Brooklyn-accented monologues to pull out a miniature skeleton, complete as Heathcliff the cat did in cartoons. But nothing was rejected from the old man’s nearly-toothless maw; this cat was cool. I tried it in one go, the sides of my child’s mouth admitting the edges of the wide cracker with difficulty. I didn’t trust the tiny fish, and I could indeed taste and feel the bones in it, partly jellied and offering little resistance. But as I bit through, the butter smoothed down the strangeness and enriched the tomato-brine in which the catch had been canned. Grandpa knew what he was about.

Similarly, I butter my bread at dinner and use it as a backboard against which to twirl my spaghetti. There, too, the acid of tomato meets with buttered carbs and performs an alchemy more compelling than even that of pasta and sauce. My favorite part of dinner is still often the end: wiping up sauces and gravies and salad dressing with a piece of buttered bread, no matter how simple. Nothing tastes as good on its own as it does paired with a bit of butter on cracker, on baguette, on cornbread, on tortilla.

Old enough to seek out my own, to fill my blue butter bell, and I’ve become more particular. I prefer Irish butter, but I will buy good French salted Bordier if I can get it, or the Trader Joe’s knockoff if I cannot. Old enough to have tried buttered coffee (it’s fine) and to have substituted butter and an extra egg in a boxed cake mix (never going back). Old enough to have made my own eggs and soldiers, to have bought my own stainless steel set of cups and trepanning shell cracker. Old enough to have had my cholesterol checked (I’m genetically lucky!) and to fret about the way groceries seem to get more expensive every month. I will downgrade a lot of other things before I buy cheap butter.

Old enough, on my forty-second birthday, to drag my husband to Quality Bistro in New York City. The midtown restaurant was incredibly busy on a Friday night, and he hates crowds but he loves me. So we went to a place that is famous for a couple of things, but most notably their butter service. An expensive appetizer, it is like no other serving of bread and butter ever presented at my table. A tall moulded mound of butter was driven to us like a dessert cart, and a huge scoop came from the crock to a marble platter. Waiting on the platter lay slices of Filone bread from the nearby Sullivan Street Bakery, sour tiny cornichons, and pale red radishes. The waiter added chopped shallots, fleur de sel, pimente d'espelette, and freshly ground black pepper to the generous smear of my favorite thing.

I clapped when I saw it also came with jambon cuit, because it meant that we could approximate the Parisian delicacy of a jambon-buerre: a ham and butter sandwich. Rounding out the experience were pickled leeks, mushroom duxelles, and a little hachée basquaise of chorizo, Parmesan cheese, vinegar, paprika, honey, almonds, and raisins. The QB butter service is a meal in itself, and we couldn’t finish it. When we got boxes to go, I made sure that one of them was just filled with the butter. I cooked with it and ate it on toast for another week afterward.

The older I get, the more I appreciate a simple thing done well. The more exasperated I become with the worsening of everything I have come to count on, the more I treasure the things that do not change. I open the newspaper with a half-open eye, and I do not look at my email over breakfast. I pour my date-syruped coffee and say a prayer of thanks for the coconut cream that crossed the ocean to be with me. I know that when I swing open my butter dish, the room-temperature brick of yellow grace will greet me as it always has, performing its many jobs of greasing pans and soothing my nerves. When I spread it on toast, it doesn’t stray into separate states of matter the way that foreign margarine once did.

Butter cannot be improved upon. Butter is perfect.