Chapter 28
A staple of Renaissance banquets—where Popes set lavish tables with figures of Hercules wrestling a lion or Moors riding dromedaries—butter sculptures evolved into promotions for a dairy industry battling with the scourge of margarine. Celebrated attractions at world expos, dairy trade shows, and state fairs, the succulent statuary saw initial expression in the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, where Caroline Shawk Brooks displayed Dreaming Iolanthe, a bas-relief butter bust of the blind princess from Danish poet and playwright Henrik Hertz’s play, “King René’s Daughter,” that was housed in the women’s pavilion. A farm wife from Arkansas, Brooks, like many prairie wives, handled the butter-making chores. She adapted the widespread practice of using wooden butter molds to shape the milk by-product into something decorative—and then added more cowbell.
What was art became artillery in the “Butter War” that engulfed the nation. Following the U.S. debut of margarine in the 1870s, sale of the beef fat and milk concoction was outlawed by a slew of states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Other states refused to stand pat, permitting the sale of margarine but only if its pallor was left its natural corpse-like whitish-grey, taxing it for the effrontery of assuming an artificial yellow color.
Still more states wanted it dyed blood-splatter red, funeral-home black, or cotton-candy pink in a fait accompli of branding worthy of Hawthorne.
The dairy lobby desired a competitive landscape as cleansed of margarine as the western prairie would have been of buffalo by about 1890. Dairy industry publications slurred its rival as “the slag of the butcher shop . . . a compound of diseased hogs and dead dogs.” Other, even more excessive, accounts shrieked that it contained the “germs of cancer,” and that margarine—in the way perhaps that contemporary cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg thought of masturbation—could unhinge the healthy human mind. And the Federal Margarine Act of 1886 forced affixed product labels on the faux butter to be clearly and unmistakably marked “margarine.”
By the late 1880s margarine manufacturers, including the largest one, the Commercial Manufacturing Company, had melted away. Its savory battle of Agincourt won, butter proved a magnanimous, even benign, victor as it made its way into the mainstream, alongside other victuals. Near the turn of the twentieth century, advances such as better refrigeration, the Swedish cream separator, and the Babcock test for measuring the butterfat content of milk helped move butter from the farm wife’s domain to the factory’s. Similarly, butter sculptures were thus emancipated from their feminine jurisdiction and entered the manlier ring of commerce.
To demonstrate the growing abundance of foods once too scarce, too expensive, or too perishable to be widely available, states, cities, and industrial associations used world’s fairs, trade shows, and state fairs to demonstrate these foods’ newly growing abundance. At Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, for example, a thirty-foot-tall lighthouse composed of California oranges, a map of the United States made of pickles, a Liberty Bell fabricated from oranges, and a medieval King Arthur-esque knight composed of prunes suggested the cornucopia modern agriculture had become.
Now as obscure and distant as the Peloponnesian War, the Butter War has faded from modern consciousness. By 1955 every state had repealed its anti-margarine color laws, except Wisconsin and Minnesota, which held out until 1967 and 1963, respectively.
What remains, like a scrap of a Civil War uniform from Gettysburg, is the record of statuary from expos and fairs.
In 1901, visitors to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, stood agape at a 1,000-pound, eleven-foot-long model of the Minnesota State House sculpted in intricate detail in butter—and in fact, the succulent statuary was perhaps nowhere more popular than the Minnesota State Fair. An integral part of the fair since 1898, when E. Frances Milton of St. Paul carved a 500-pound mass of butter into a shrine to American military triumphs, including the charge of the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, butter sculptures reached their apogee at the 1910 fair with a six-foot-tall model of Teddy Roosevelt. Standing over a vanquished lion, the palatable ex-president represented a masculine and healthy vibe meant to counteract consumers’ perception of butter as feminine and impure.
Like the ice-cream cone, Belgian waffles, and numerous other nourishments introduced or popularized at fairs, butter sculptures have stood the test of time. From 1914 to 1955, Lincoln, Nebraska, sculptor and taxidermist J.E. Wallace carved butter sculptures for fairs in Iowa, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Since 1957, Norma “Duffy” Lyons has supplied butter figurines for the Iowa State Fair, with a dairy resume that includes portraits of Elvis Presley, Garth Brooks, Tiger Woods, and a Last Supper.
Minnesota State Fair Archives
Every year for more than half a century, the winner of the Midwest Dairy Association’s Minnesota Dairy Princess Program is immortalized in butter at the state fair. The champion and other finalists for the Princess Kay of the Milky Way competition are sculpted out of ninety-pound chunks of Grade-A butter inside a glass-walled refrigerated booth chilled to 40 degrees. Inside the booth, an artist spends up to eight hours carving just the one sculpture, each chisel and incision an echo of pioneer artists who shaped fictional heroines and macho presidents from agitated milk. Margarine may have its virtues, but they don’t carve statues of beauty queens from it.