Today is Butter Day. A day to celebrate butter. Nothing really wrong with that. At least, nothing so far this week that I’ve seen.
Butter is one of those things like bacon. One day it’s good for you, the next it isn’t. Okay… so maybe bacon is never really good for you. Butter might be, though. It has saturated fats, which are supposedly better than unsaturated fats, which are in margarine, and saturated fats are better for you. I think. You might want to Google that and check.
Butter is one of those things that I have long wondered about. Who was the first person who thought they could take that white stuff out of a cow, beat it for hours on end and then eat the greasy stuff that forms? Almost like the first guy to eat mushrooms.
When you think about it, some person probably had a jug of milk when he was chased by a herd of wooly mammoths. When they finally stopped running, shaking the milk had turned part of it solid, and that solid stuff tasted good. At least that’s how I picture it.
I never got chased by wooly mammoths, but I am old enough to remember you had a rough idea how far into the month you were by the colour of the butter.
This would be in the days on the monthly pay cheque. At the first of the month, there would be butter. Then, as the month went on and groceries were used, toward the end of the month the butter would sort of turn orange.
What was really happening was that butter was being replaced by margarine and at some point in history, dairy farmers got scared of the competition, and first had extra taxes put on it, then asked for it to not be the same colour, so people could tell the difference.
So margarine would come white and you had to mix in colour to make it look more like butter. Only the colour was more orange than butter colour, and really, if you couldn’t tell the difference with one little taste, you really had issues with your taste buds.
But as you went through the month and the grocery budget would dwindle, the colour of the butter would change as you got to the end of the month and it was switched out for margarine.
Then margarine became better for you, or so we thought. It also got better looking and better tasting, and started to take over.
But butter has made a bit of a comeback, and when it comes to cooking, I most always have a bit around. The flavour is just far better.
So here’s to whoever that first person to make butter was. Thanks for outrunning that mammoth.