Butter

Everything is better with butter. You can engrave that on my memorial stone. My family knows that I can only relax if I know that there’s at least a pound of butter in the house. Are there really people who eat cooked vegetables without a dollop of that golden ambrosia gently melting down its slopes & crags, enriching the taste of each spoonful?

Maybe my love of butter is hereditary. My Grandma Moan used to eat it straight from the butter dish. Butter seemed to her like spinach to Popeye the Sailor Man. She was a strong, sparrow of a woman, who lived about ninety years, chopping wood for her stove almost to the end. She’d serve butter up to us on her sturdy, home-baked bread, especially tantalizing straight from the oven, when the butter melts deep into the grain of the slice.

In the dairy states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, eating butter was a form of solidarity with the small farmers of those days. They resisted the push for margarine by passing laws that only allowed margarine to be sold in its unimproved form. Aunt & Uncle Nestor used the stuff. I remember that it came in a sealed plastic bag, all white, like lard, with a red dot of dye in the middle. We’d have simple fun squeezing the bag of lard—I mean butter—over and over until the dye was distributed evenly giving the margarine a butter-like color. But I never forgot what it really looked like. And our family never used margarine no matter what claims were made for it.

In India the cow is sacred and so, milk and butter are holy gifts. Lord Krishna Himself was raised as a cow herder and many a portrait shows Him playing His flute as he tends the cows. Well treated cows give more milk and better milk.

For butter to be at its best, it must come from such cows—treated with love and respect. They should neither be treated like cattle in the pejorative sense or milked for profits using inhumane methods. Such cows are difficult to find in America. Organic farms MIGHT be better. The best is most likely found locally, made from milk received from a small family farm. I remember going to the local creamery with Grandfather, where the nearby farmers brought their milk to a collective to be pasteurized and made into butter and cheese. Now who knows where our milk and butter come from? And if those cows were serenaded ?