FRESH SWEET CORN, boiled and eaten straight off the cob, is a dish so simple that it is scarcely appropriate to call it a “dish” at all. Because of this, and because we are allowed to dispense almost entirely with utensils in the process, eating corn off the cob makes us feel robust, earthy, and in touch with nature and basic rock-bottom reality. But the delicious, simple, honest corn cob is in fact the crowning achievement of enormous human efforts of will, imagination, foresight, drive, and relentless, obsessive selectivity – to say nothing of the inconceivable complexities of “simple” nature. The pinch of salt we sprinkle over the corn is an ancient symbol of creative ingenuity, and today more than ever representative of human technological ambition.
Finally, with a lordly gesture, we douse our corn in butter. The rows of kernels, rounded and yellow like little butter pats themselves, are anointed with a golden semi-solid fat which melts and trickles over the corn, lubricating it, rounding out its flavour, and completing its appeal. It is exceedingly difficult for us to achieve opportunities to revel in the experience of extreme simplicity. And it is not easy either to describe or to account for our own culture’s particular predilection for butter-a loyalty so fierce and so unreasoning that it is called, by those opposed to it, the “butter mystique.”
Butter is the crème de la crème, the quintessence of the risen richness of milk itself, and as such has traditionally belonged to the exclusive category of “best” things: “top,” “opulent,” “pure” things. Even for cultures that almost never eat it, butter often achieves an aura of medicinal and cosmetic power; among the butter-eaters, that minority of people who originate in the steppes and the cold north, it has always had regal status as a substance both unique and splendidly filling.
In some respects butter has only one peer among foodstuffs, and that is honey. Milk and honey are the only substances people commonly eat which are created by animals specifically to feed their young. Butter is thick and golden. So is honey, which in many religions is the nearest thing to the food of the gods themselves. Butter and honey are delicious together: they complement each other, and harmonize with each other. They are the ultimate fat and the original sugar, products of land which is rich and fertile (and may be said to “flow with milk and honey”). Our enjoyment of them demonstrates human domination over the animal kingdom. At the same time, neither butter-making nor honey-collecting necessarily entails the guilt which men have sometimes, in their more thoughtful moments, suffered when they killed animals to feed themselves.
Butter has it both ways: not only is it a fat, and as such broadly delectable; it also comes haloed with all the complexities and perversities of status. The immediate appeal of grease resembles that of sugar: it is so easy to like it that “good taste” (that ineffable and therefore unattackable bastion of the élite) is always very quick to find it disgusting. The German word Schmalz usually means lard, but includes the very finest fat, which is butter; in Yiddish it means most commonly chicken fat. The term in English now denotes (as it can in German and Yiddish) a far-too-easy and therefore repulsive sentimentality, of the kind we also describe as “sugary.” Too many people like it; they pile it on; it is offensive to the superior few who have plenty available and are therefore sickened by excess. But the Germans still have an expression which most aptly describes the other side of the coin: something ohne Salz und Schmalz, without salt and grease, is boring and wishy-washy.
In spite of modern struggles against obesity and the consequent revulsion of people of taste from most fats wherever they are detectable, butter still maintains the “high” connotations which it has inherited from the past. Butter has always seemed magical because of the mystery of its solidification out of milk. Absolutely nothing else is made like this, or from such a noble substance as milk. Butter is irreproachable, unique, and irreplaceable. In this it is like salt, except that salt, as earth, is strange in being edible, whereas milk’s prime function is to feed. Corn, as we now normally eat it, is either white or yellow. Salt is white. Milk is white, butter yellow, honey gold. For us the colours white and gold have distinct meanings, but they both signify purity, delectableness, even heavenliness.
Industrialized modern civilizations, whether capitalist or communist, find it extremely difficult to accept that anything is either unique or irreplaceable. The myth is egalitarian, and the ostensible goal is either universal availability of everything, or absolute interchangeability, or both. This means that the claims of anything either to rarity or to having no substitute must instantly be questioned. Salt has remained irreplaceable, but it has been found to be anything but scarce – indeed we risk being salted to death if we do not take care: the battle against the rarity of salt is definitely over.
The “butter mystique” is challenged by margarine, a substance born of the industrial age, expressive of technological claims and methods, and one which relentlessly contests the notion that the quality of butter is inimitable. But the old monarch refuses to be dislodged, and has not been above using some thoroughly disreputable tactics in the battle. The ferocity in itself should alert us to the fact that there is a great deal more going on here than a simple scrap for a market between butter and margarine.
The first cooking pots were containers found in nature: pods, husks, gourds, shells, and animal skins. Since butter as it separates from milk is a highly perishable commodity, the extensive use of it is usually found in cold countries, and among people who herd animals for a living. It is perfectly possible that butter was first discovered by travellers carrying whole milk in animal-skin containers, who opened their pouches after a long bumpy trip to find the miracle had occurred: the milk had spontaneously turned into butter and a thin, still drinkable liquid, buttermilk. People had only to reproduce the jouncing and agitating of milk to create butter whenever they wanted it. Until very recently in the Middle East, butter churning was often done by street vendors, squatting before a paunch full of milk suspended on cords from a stick tripod, which the milkman shook and jiggled till he could hear that the butter had “come” inside.
It takes about twenty litres of milk to churn out one kilogram of butter. Exactly how churning works is still unclear. The process involves breaking down the foam produced by the incorporation of air into whipped cream by continuing to beat the mass at a temperature between 12° and 18°C. (53° and 64 °F.). Membranes which keep globules of fat apart in the cream are first softened then broken; the fat begins to coagulate, and emulsifiers such as lecithin from the ruptured membranes help burst bubble walls in the foam, so allowing all the fat to mass together. The finished butter, separated from its buttermilk, is an immensely complex system of water droplets, air bubbles, milk fat crystals and free (non-crystalline) fat. Butters can vary a good deal, because of the churning, in density and spreadability (that is, in the ordering of their molecular composition) as well as in taste.
The Celts, whom we have already met mining their salt at Hallstatt in modern Austria, are thought to have had much to do with introducing the technology of butter-churning to the areas of modern Europe, such as modern Germany, France, and Britain, which they influenced for over a millennium before Christ. They were expert barrel and churn makers, and their access to salt must early on have given them the means of preserving butter.
Hand churning always called for both strength and discernment. The simplest of the European butter churns, invented early in the Middle Ages and commonly in use well into the nineteenth century, was a narrow upright wooden tub with a lid, through the centre of which ran a long wooden rod fitted with a perforated attachment at the bottom. The dairymaid stood over the tub and pounded this plunger or dasher up and down in the cream till the sound and the feel of the contents told her the butter had formed in globules of the correct size. The regularity, the precise speed, and the length of the strokes were important. Churning had to be done at the right time of the morning or evening to ensure that the temperature was correct; the process could take hours in hot or stormy weather.
The butter when ready was collected, kneaded, and pummelled to expel any beads of buttermilk still enclosed in the fat. Then it was “flung” into pots for home use, or salted and packed into firkins or barrels for sale. When people made their own butter, every town and every household provided a different product. Each region preferred a distinctive traditional shape – round, rectangular, or cubed; and every farm had a carved wooden stamp for marking its merchandise. In Cambridgeshire, butter was cylindrical, passed through a ring gauge and sold by the yard. Butter also came in pieces the size and shape of an egg, which is why old-fashioned recipes often awkwardly demand that you should “take a piece of butter the size [sometimes this is changed to the “weight”] of an egg. . . .”
After the butter had been made, the buttermilk could be heated and its remaining solid content strained off to make hard cheese. Those who could afford to feed buttermilk to their pigs produced prime quality pork. (The “buttermilk” sold in North American supermarkets today is an entirely different product, made of pasteurized skim milk with a culture added to thicken it and increase its lactic acid content.)
Dairy work included milking, making cream and butter, and also the sophisticated art of making cheese. In Europe it was always done by women. The word “dairy” is from Middle English dey – a female servant. The dairy was associated with the house as opposed to the lands; “inside” has always been female in the Western imagination, and “outside” male, so that the man’s place was in the public eye while the woman’s was at home. Also, milk was perhaps considered self-evidently a woman’s affair.
A “cool hand” was the term used for giftedness in butter-making: kneading butter required swift, firm movements and a low temperature. When a farmer from an English county like Cheshire, famous for its dairy produce, sought a wife, he chose brawn over delicacy every time. In one village it was traditional for a young girl to lift the immensely heavy lid of the parish chest with one hand, to show how desirable she was.
People often claimed that they could tell from the taste of the butter which of their cows had produced it. Differences stemmed from the physical constitution of the cow, what she had eaten, and what season of the year it was, as well as from variations in the treatment of the milk itself. The milk was left to stand while the cream rose to the top. Fine butter was made from the first cream skimmed from the milk. The second skimming produced lower-quality “after-butter,” while “whey butter,” the cheapest, was made from curds remaining in the whey after cheese had been made from whole milk. The best butter of all was made from the “strokings,” the cow’s richest milk which arrived, with the aid of the milkmaid’s careful stroking, only at the end of each milking session.
The length of time the cream was allowed to stand was of enormous importance to the taste of butter. People used generally to like a strong lactic flavour, so that cream was left to ripen before churning for at least three and as long as seven days. Most factory butter sold today is from “sweet,” very newly risen and pasteurized cream, with a mild lactic acid added. The method discourages bacteria and also satisfies the increasing modern demand for mildness of flavour in everything. Ripe-butter enthusiasts in North America can buy a product which is given the added strength of dried bacillic cultures imported from one of the European countries which still produce strong-tasting butter: Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, or Switzerland. This butter, labelled with the happy epithet “cultured,” is sold at “luxury” prices in specialty stores; a minority of people are willing to pay more for something resembling the original heady taste. Butter made from newly risen cream requires more salt for keeping than does ripe butter, and this has until quite recently resulted in taste preferences: salt for mild butter lovers, and saltless for those who like butter ripe.
At least four hundred volatile compounds have been detected in the aroma of butter. The alteration or lack of even one of these is liable to be noticed immediately, so sensitive and fastidious are our bodily mechanisms for responding to milk. “Rancid” derives from the Latin rancidus, “rank” or “stinking”: it is a term reserved exclusively for fats. There are two main kinds of rancidity: hydrolytic (change caused by the absorption of flavours from food or micro-organisms) and oxidative (reaction with oxygen in the air). People can learn actively to like some forms of the first type, acquiring a taste for soured cream, ripened butter, and the various rotten properties in the great cheeses, such as Stilton, Pont l’Evèque, and Roquefort. Aroma scientists sadly concede that people’s reactions to “off flavours” are “subjectively organoleptic”: different people like different things. Hydrolysis is our own body’s method of digesting fat.
Oxidative rancidity, on the other hand, is totally unacceptable; reaction to it is always immediate revulsion. We are, it seems, biologically primed not to eat oxidated fat, for doing so can cause diarrhoea, poor growth, loss of hair, skin lesions, anorexia, emaciation, and intestinal haemorrhages. Oxidation begins with exposure to air, and for this reason butter should be kept covered. Supermarket fluorescent light-indeed light of any kind – promotes rancidity, which is why good-quality butter is now sold wrapped in foil.
Butter varies in colour from pale cream to yellow, depending largely on what the cow eats. Winter butter has always been pale, and summer butter yellow. It was believed for centuries that eating buttercups made the cow give yellow butter; this, indeed, is the origin of the flower’s common name. (In fact, of course, all kinds of plant pigments, not merely yellow flowers, give butter its colour.) Children still hold a buttercup under a friend’s chin, and if a golden colour is reflected, they say, “You love butter.” People have always liked the idea of butter being yellow: the colour distinguished butter from lard, and since the essential richness of the milk was the dominating idea, gold is naturally the desired colour.
From the Middle Ages onwards we have records of people colouring butter which they did not consider yellow enough. A law was passed in Paris in 1396 forbidding the tinting of butter with “saucy flowers,” herbs, or drugs. Marigolds (that is, pot marigolds or calendulas, not the originally American plant of the same name) were traditionally stored salted in earthenware pots, taken out when needed and beaten with a small iron ball to extract juice for colouring winter butter. Carrot juice, saffron, and later annatto, an orange-red dye extracted from the fruit of a South American tree, were other agents. Today annatto and other oil-soluble dyes are used for the same purpose, but in the United States the powerful dairy lobby has seen to it that the colouring of butter does not have to be confessed on the wrapping. Our distrust of modern chemical additives makes it worth disguising an ancient practice.
“Butter is made from crayme,” wrote Andrew Boorde in 1542. “It is good to eat in the mornyng – a lytell porcyon is good for every man in the mornyng if it be newe made.” People commonly believed that butter was bad for the stomach unless eaten first thing in the day: it was thought to lie in a layer at the top of the stomach’s contents “as the fatness doth swim above in a boiling pot.” Everyone agreed, too, that butter should be eaten as soon as possible after it was churned – the ideal being to own your cow and churn your butter daily. The reason was gastronomic as well as hygienic, and the ideal was possible only if you lived in the country.
Most city people today seldom see rotten food, but taste fresh food more rarely still. As far as butter goes, we have almost conquered rancidity by means of cold storage, careful packaging, and sterilization. But milk is now factory produced (the trade still calls it “creamery” milk because of the clean and delicious ring of the word), which means that it is mixed from the yield of hundreds of cows raised on standard feed. It is often weeks or even months old before we get it. We are not provided with a choice of different levels of cream-ripening. The product we buy is therefore always the same, and we have almost forgotten what freshly churned butter is like.
A Greek poem satyrizing a Thracian wedding in the fourth century BC describes the guests as “butterophagous gentry” with unkempt hair. The two attributes amount to the same thing: untidy hair and butter-eating were equally outlandish. Greeks in their own estimation had better coiffeurs than anything available to Thracians; Greeks preferred olive oil to barbarous butter.
The word butter comes from bou-tyron, which seems to mean “cow-cheese” in Greek. Some scholars think, however, that the word was borrowed from the language of the northern and butterophagous Scythians, who herded cattle; Greeks lived mostly from sheep and goats whose milk, which they consumed mainly as cheese, was relatively low in butter (or butyric) fat. Butter divides the people of northern Europe as radically from the oil-loving southerners as beer and cider distinguish them from wine-drinkers. People from Mediterranean lands believed until at least the eighteenth century that butter was a cause of the leprosy which seemed to be so prevalent in the north. The Cardinal of Aragon took his own cook and plenty of olive oil when he visited Holland in 1516.
Most people, aside from Caucasian northern Europeans and their descendants and a few nomadic African tribes, are biologically lactose-intolerant after their milk-drinking, mammalian infancy. This means that they are simply unable to stomach raw milk. Human babies are born with provisions of the enzyme lactase which enables them to digest lactose or milk sugar. Ability to manufacture the enzyme is soon lost in lactose-intolerant people, who thereafter cannot drink more than a cup or so of raw milk without suffering nausea and diarrhoea. The reason for this is thought to be the evolutionary undesirability of having adults compete with their own offspring for the milk-source. The people who began to domesticate cattle about ten thousand years ago developed lactose tolerance into adulthood: those who could take milk, on occasion using it as their major food source, survived and handed on the trait to their children. Lactose helps in the absorption of calcium; it is, therefore, extra-desirable for the populations who live in the cold, relatively sunless north, where little vitamin D is created in the human skin. This may be why the development of the capacity to keep ingesting plenty of milk is an especially northern trait. It has been found that cultural acceptance of milk eventually produces a sufficiency of the enzyme in the population – although an estimated 16 per cent of people will never be able to take raw milk, even in our own unprecedentedly milk-loving society.
Greeks, Arabs, and Near-Eastern Jews, whose cultures are resistant to raw milk, dislike drinking it in spite of a long dairying history. The indigenous millions of Oceania, the Americas, China, and Japan remain largely milk intolerant. Butter, cheese, yoghurt, and soured milk like laban are all low in lactose because the fermenting bacteria use it up as fuel; these foods are therefore biologically acceptable by everybody, although non-milk-drinking people may eat them very seldom. Butter is more extravagant to make, and in its solid form more difficult to keep, than the other low-lactose milk products, and may therefore become a rarity and as such either precious or abominable, depending on the circumstances of the encounter with it.
In the oil-loving European south, butter, being expensive and relatively rare, tends to be perceived as a luxury. In the Middle Ages it was one of the foods banned during Lent. This was a minor inconvenience in the south where the normal cooking medium was olive or walnut oil; it was however a great hardship in the north, where butter was an everyday necessity. Clever southern businessmen cashed in on Lent by selling oil to the north during this time. The more cynical northerners would simply pay their way out of the ban; the magnificent Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral was built with money which the Church received from people who preferred to pay rather than forgo their daily butter. Not being allowed to eat butter especially enraged the idealistic Martin Luther. “For at Rome they themselves laugh at the fasts,” he wrote in 1520, “making us foreigners eat the oil with which they would not grease their shoes, and afterwards selling us liberty to eat butter. . . .”
In the days before the Japanese came systematically into contact with the west, butter was practically unknown to them. Those who did meet Europeans were appalled by their stench: people who seldom touch animal products are extremely sensitive to the body-odour exuded by eaters of animal fat. It was butter, the Japanese thought, which made Europeans so peculiarly rank: bata-kusai they called them (using the English word for the foul substance): “butter-stinkers.”
Fat discourages insects and fat keeps you warm. Many travellers who have lived among pastoral societies in cold climates, like the Mongols and Tibetans, have described how these people spent their lives coated in grease, usually butter, which might turn black and rancid before anyone seemed to mind. People have always enjoyed oiling their bodies, and hot water for washing was not commonly available until very recently. Our own fanatical obsession with washing is mostly new and largely a matter of our own self-esteem: it is a habit which would have astounded most of our ancestors, including the fastidious and supercilious Greeks.
Another very luxurious practice, often available only to the rich, was coating one’s hair in butter or lard. It kept down vermin, helped preserve order in an elaborate hair-do, and added a gleam for which even we occasionally yearn, with our “structuring” hair-gel, brilliantine, and other hair oils. In many societies, including ancient Egypt and modern Ethiopia, a lump of fatty incense or of perfumed butter was placed on the head and allowed to melt and drizzle voluptuously down one’s face and body. The connotations of “greasy” were with “shiny” – richness, lubrication, brightness – and not, as we have it, with nausea, dirt, and “foreigners.”
Butter has always been considered to have medicinal properties. Lubrication was the key here. Butter was the finest fat for softening the skin. It was said to relieve burns and babies’ rashes, and was often thought to help children’s growing pains and stiffness of the joints in the old. Pliny wrote that butter “has the properties of oil, and is used for anointing by all the barbarians – and by us [Romans] in the case of children.” Wounded elephants in first-century India were treated by being made to swallow butter, or by having their wounds anointed with it. The Celtic word for butter is from the Indo-European for “ointment,” and the Vikings called butter “cow-smear.”
One strange but widely used sixteenth-century European medicine against pain in the joints was made from butter left to liquefy in the sun for several days and then drunk; it is thought that the method might have increased the vitamin D in this rancid concoction, which could thus have developed anti-rachitic properties (despite the nasty side-effects which must also have been produced). Butter’s “lubricating” effect when drunk rancid also made it a useful laxative.
Butter can be kept from going rancid by melting it and removing the milk solids which separate out of it. First the whey proteins, which gather as froth on the top of hot melted butter, are skimmed off, and then the middle layer of clarified oil is carefully poured away from the casein and salt which have sunk to the bottom of the pan. Clarified butter, the golden liquid which results, will last a year or longer without refrigeration if no air comes in contact with it, and it possesses the further advantage of not burning easily when used as a cooking medium.
In India, clarified butter is called ghee. It is the most precious substance provided by the most sacred beast on earth, the cow. In Hindu mythology, Prajápati, Lord of Creatures, created ghee by rubbing or “churning” his hands together and then poured it into fire to engender his progeny; whenever the Vedic ritual was performed of pouring ghee into fire, it was a re-enactment of creation. (Butter in mythologies the world over is a symbol of semen: churning represents the sexual act, and also the formation of a child in its mother’s womb.)
Later, during the Deluge, continues the Indian myth, the honey-like elixir of immortality called amrita got lost in the cosmic ocean of milk. The gods and the demons joined forces to save it by churning the ocean until various gods and sacred objects solidified out like butter from the milk: the cow of plenty, the goddess of wine, the moon, the terrible poison which is twin-liquor to amrita, the coral tree which perfumes the world, the goddess of beauty holding a lotus; finally the physician of the gods stepped carefully forward, carrying a milk-white bowl full of amrita.
One of the hymns of the Rg Veda (circa 1500 BC) is in praise of ghee, and is intended to be accompanied by ritual libations of the golden substance into fire. These are some of the words:
This is the secret name of Butter:
“Tongue of the gods,” “navel of immortality.”
We will proclaim the name of Butter;
We will sustain it in this sacrifice by bowing low . . .
These waves of Butter flow like gazelles before the hunter . . .
Streams of Butter caress the burning wood.
Agni, the fire, loves them and is satisfied.
Here butter is fertilizing seed, a regenerator of riches: its sputtering and crackling reawaken Agni himself. It also represents the pure energy of communal prayer and the inspiration to mysticism and poetry.
Statues of Vishnu and Krishna are ritually anointed with two intensely sacred mixtures of five substances, one called pançamrita: milk, curds, ghee, honey, and sugar, and the other “the five products of the cow”: milk, curds, ghee, urine, and dung. Both of these can be used to purify people who have committed temporarily polluting offenses, or as antidotes to poison and disease. The lamps that light the holiest places in Hindu temples are wicks burning in ghee – as are the lamps swung in circular motions before the images of various deities, or lit at the great Festival of Lights in honour of Lakshmi and Rama.
Hindus rank food (high to low) as raw, superior cooked, inferior cooked, and garbage. No one may eat “inferior” foods, like rice and lentils, which have been touched by someone of a lower caste than himself; but anything “superior” may be taken from any caste except the lowest of all. Inferior food cooked in irreproachable ghee instantly becomes pakka, “complete” or “superior,” and edible even by a Brahmin. A travelling Brahmin who does not know who has been touching the food available to him, must receive everything he eats raw and still unpeeled, unless food vendors can demonstrate that their wares are cooked in ghee.
Ghee is expensive and much in demand, because of its exalted status, at Hindu weddings. Male guests are expected to compete with each other to see who can eat the most of it: consuming a kilo or more at a sitting is considered a proof of virility. The occasion and the sexual connotations of ghee turn the contest into a kind of fertility ritual.
In 1948, one of the last descriptions was made of the Festival of the Butter Gods in Tibet. What Harrison Forman, writing for the Canadian Geographic, saw was one of the world’s most magnificent religious celebrations, a particularly splendid example of which took place annually at the monastery he visited, Kum Bum Gomba. Half a million pilgrims, representative of the Buddhist world from Siberia to modern Sri Lanka, and from the Russian Pamirs to the Pacific, took part in the festival and were themselves part of the pageantry. It continued for many days, with songs and dancing, masked theatre, a huge market, the Questioning of the Lamas, chanted prayers, and music accompanied by cymbals, drums, gongs, flutes, oboes, and brass trumpets up to twenty feet long. The climax of the whole celebration was the night-long display of the Butter Gods.
Immense panels of bas-reliefs representing Buddhist deities and mythical subjects had been carved in yak butter by scores of lamas, supervised by a guild of artists acclaimed as among the finest in the Buddhist world. They had taken months to make the figures, which were multicoloured, as much as three metres (10 ft.) tall, and amazingly intricate, with every hair, every realistic detail of the design on their “silken” clothes, every bead in their elaborate jewellery meticulously carved and moulded in butter. Some of the tableaux included hundreds of lively figures in action. The monks had had to work in the cold, and often suffered from frozen hands and feet during the winter weeks of work. Every year the sculptures were entirely different.
The crowd surged forward to gaze at the butter figures in the flickering light of thousands of yak-butter lamps. As the night passed the butter began to melt in the heat. By dawn it was all over: the temporary is intrinsic to the nature of festivals. The sacred occasion had passed, and the special manifestation of the gods was finished for that year.
Tibetan life still revolves around the yak, which this people has herded and placed at the centre of its culture for at least two thousand years. Tibetans are warmed by yak-dung fires and lit by yak-butter lamps; they eat yak meat and yak blood, butter, cheese, and yoghurt; they use yaks for transport and weave clothing, blankets, shelters, and even boats out of yak hair. Their staple dish is tsampa, made of salted tea pounded together with yak butter, to which toasted barley flour is added and mixed by hand before eating. The dependence in so many ways upon their particular animal herd is typical of pastoralists, the original “butter-eaters,” the world over.
Russians in the regions of Uzbek, Bashkir, and Kirgiz still drink mares’ and donkeys’ milk and turn it into kumyss, a powerful fermented liquor or spirit, often served with lumps of butter in it. Kumyss is mentioned in reports from Christian missionaries in central Siberia in 1253; Marco Polo wrote in 1298 that Genghis Khan kept a stable of ten thousand white horses for the production of kumyss. This is probably the same drink as the oxygala (“sharp milk”) which the ancient Greeks knew from the horse-riding and “butterophagous” Scythians. Herodotus had reported that the Scythians used to blind their slaves and then make them sit round wooden barrels full of mares’ milk and “stir them round and round; the stuff that rises to the top is skimmed, and considered more valuable than what sinks to the bottom.” The Scythians ate horse meat and horse butter and drank horse buttermilk and oxygala, using strainers to remove the scum; many of these strainers of bone, and kumyss or oxygala jars with sieves built into them, have been found in Scythian tombs, together, sometimes, with the tattooed bodies of the Scythians themselves, preserved in the icy soil of central Russia.
In T’ang China, kumyss, clotted cream, and clarified butter were three stages in a hierarchy of products derived from milk. In Buddhist religious imagery, each of them symbolized a stage in the transformation of the soul. Clarified butter represented the ultimate development of the Buddha spirit.
The descendants of the Caucasian pastoralists who now people northern Europe have long been the world’s largest consumers of butter. The Dutch used to be called by the English “buttermouths” and “butterboxes” after their insistence on carrying their own butter supply with them in boxes when they travelled. The Irish, it is said, may still eat more butter than any population on earth. They have always spread and dolloped it onto their staple foods: porridge, then potatoes and bread. When poverty forced people to do without butter, the substance simply became more symbolic than ever of riches and plenty. Giving butter to a guest or a stranger was Christian hospitality. The obituary of a miser in 1486 reads “Neidh O’Mulconry, head of the inhospitality of Ireland, died. It was he who solemnly swore that he would never give bread and butter together to guests.” And the medieval Vision of MacConglinne, which is supposed to cause the mouth of the Devil himself to drool with greed, places butter squarely into its landscape of custards, bacon, and glistening fat.
Some of the commonest archaeological finds in Ireland are barrels of ancient butter, buried in the bogs. The Norsemen, the Finns, the Icelanders, and the Scots had done the same: they flavoured butter heavily with garlic, knuckled it into a wooden firkin, and buried it for years in the bogs – for so long that people were known to plant trees to mark the butter’s burial site. The longer it was left, the more delicious it became. A further advantage was doubtless the safety of supplies from robbers, or enemies in wartime. Most of the Irish archaeological specimens date from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although some of our sources imply that bog butter turned red, the firkins in the Irish National Museum contain “a greyish cheese-like substance, partially hardened, not much like butter, and quite free from putrefaction” because of the cool, antiseptic, anaerobic, and acidic properties of peat bogs.
In Morocco, smen is still a delicacy. It is made by kneading butter with various decoctions of herbs, cinnamon, and other spices; the mixture is then cooked, salted, and strained like ghee. It is poured into jugs, tightly stoppered, and buried in the ground for months, sometimes years. Stores of the precious stuff are saved for special feasts. The smell is considered especially magnificent: a particularly aged pot of the family smen may be brought out of the cellars for honoured guests to sniff. The smen represents the riches of the house. The necessity of “doctoring” a perishable substance in order to save it in hot weather is in this manner turned into a gastronomic triumph, and hedged about with tradition and prestige. Other versions of clarified butter, called samna by non-Moroccan Arabs, are to be found throughout the Middle East.
We ourselves, in the modern industrial system created by Europe and America, might legitimately lament that “no surprises” is the nearest we seem to have come to an ideal in consumer satisfaction, and that there is very little variety in the butter offered for sale. Yet we cannot forget either that the provision of butter to European cities in the past was always a chancy and often a criminal enterprise; if you did not live in the country your butter could be very nasty indeed.
Butter was heavily salted for preservation on its long journey by boat or cart into town, or in order to last through the winter. One record, dating to 1305, tells us that one pound of salt was added to every ten pounds of butter or cheese. Not surprisingly, people usually washed their butter, kneading it with water then pummelling the liquid out, in order to remove most of the salt before eating it. Butter was often sold in a half-liquid state, or was available only rancid; Tobias Smollett complained in 1748 of some “that tasted of train-oil thickened with salt.” Sometimes butter came from cows which were led through the cities by vendors and milked in the street. There was no hygiene control; storage places were often smelly and unventilated, and produced in butter what was known as a “cowhouse” odour. Butter was frequently adulterated with lard; if rancid, washed with milk and water and salted again for sale; or falsely said to be from districts famous for good butter. A favourite trick was incorporating as much water as the butter would hold. The cheap nineteenth-century Dutch butter Londoners called “Bosh,” and which may or may not have come from Holland, contained up to 33 per cent water.
Butter has not always enjoyed the same prestige among the affluent in western Europe. Medieval recipe books, written mainly for the nobility, call for relatively little butter. Since supplies of it were plentiful until late winter in English cities until the seventeenth century, butter (like oysters) was eaten mainly by the poor, much of it with bread and cheese or herbs. The little consumed by the rich was used mostly in cooking. One result of this was vitamin A deficiency in the richer classes, who suffered commonly from bladder and kidney stones. People noticed that the Dutch, famous for the quantity of butter they ate, were less afflicted by such stones than other nations. An old Dutch proverb went: “Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past.” It is not easy to obtain historical information on the eye disease called xerophthalmia, but during the First World War we know that the Danes developed this eye disease from vitamin A deficiency because they were selling most of their butter to the Germans, who were prepared to pay high prices for it. When a low price for butter was enforced, more Danes could afford to eat it, and the number of cases of xerophthalmia became negligible within one year.
Butter and cheese fed the navies of England and Holland from the sixteenth century onward, on the new long sea voyages. An Elizabethan seaman’s ration was 115 grams (1/4 lb.) of butter per day, in addition to a bottle of beer, 450 grams (1 lb.) of ship’s biscuit, and 225 grams (1/2 lb.) of cheese. By 1730 the figures for supplies of butter to London show 225 grams (1/2 lb.) of butter being consumed per person per week. The gradual emergence of the middle class from Tudor times onward meant an increasing consumption of butter by wealthier people: butter slowly rose from the category of “food for the poor.” By the eighteenth century the rich had acquired the habit of eating plenty of it. England, first into the Industrial Revolution with its attendant rise in the population and desertion of the country for cities, soon had to import large amounts of butter from the Continent.
What we now know as French cuisine was one of the great social and artistic achievements of the nineteenth century. It was based upon olive oil in the south and butter in the north; and since prestige and power lay mostly in the north, butter became one of the foundations of the art and science of the great French chefs – of what is known as cuisine classique. To this day southern French cooking tends to be called “hearty” or “robust,” and other rustic epithets, even by its greatest admirers: delicacy and finesse generally involve the use of butter.
By 1902, English upper-class families were eating three times as much butter as the rest of the population; it had become one of the ways in which they demonstrated their superiority. Margarine had already begun seriously to undermine butter sales, but the passion for butter (in part because it remained the first choice and the luxury of the rich, living literally off the fat of the land) was if anything greater than ever.
Ever since the early years of this century the trend has been gradually reversing itself. Increasingly, people in wealthy countries, like the upper classes in pre-seventeenth-century Europe, feel it behoves them to reduce their intake of visible fat. Then, butter was poor men’s food and despised as such. Now, eating little fat although plenty of it is available, and managing – through an aristocratic combination of expense, pride, and self control – not to be fat, has attained the kind of ineffable prestige which once accrued to soft hands and clean linen. Our sedentary lives and access to various alternative sources of calories have induced in us a shudder at the thought of the unctuous and quivering lumps of fat for which Homer’s gods lusted. Most of us do eat a lot of grease, but less than a third of it is actually seen and tasted as fat; compound and processed foods effectively disguise the rest.
Yet the idea of butter, and words like “buttery,” “deep-buttered,” or “butterball,” retain their enticing power in North American language. The reason is partly traditional. The English and the Dutch who emigrated to the States in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries took the butter habit with them. Foreign travellers commonly noted that Americans ate absolutely everything – porridge, soup, meat, vegetables, and puddings – swimming in butter. On extended journeys a cow was often taken along and its milk allowed to churn itself in the barrels with the lurching of the wagons. The butter was removed, washed, and salted at night.
When Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote The American Woman’s Home, they complained bitterly about the low standard and the rancidity of much American butter: they had to “taste 20 firkins” of it before finding one that was edible. But they incidentally demonstrate for us how all-pervasively buttery the American diet was. Bad butter, they wrote, “stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread, which fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beef-steak, which proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, in the succotash, in the squash; the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them. Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself in the dessert; but the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague.” The date was 1869. A French chemist, that very year, was busy inventing margarine.
Right up until the early twentieth century in Europe and America, many farmers believed that butter, being a magic and mystical substance, was especially at risk through witchcraft. When cows “went dry” and gave no milk, or when their milk provided little butter, or when churning simply did not cause the butter to coagulate, sorcery was at work. A witch could come into your dairy, cry, “Give no milk!” and the damage was done; the power and the butter-fat were in all probability transferred to the witch’s own cow. She could bewitch your cream so that churning was useless.
You could counter-attack by plunging a crooked sixpence or a piece of red-hot iron, such as a poker or a horse-shoe, into the cream, whip the tub or tie it up, or fling anti-maledictory salt both into the churn and into the fire. Prevention of sorcery was achieved by always keeping handy a piece of the magic mountain ash, rowan, either tied to the churn or used as a stirring implement; many churns were bought with rowan-wood handles already provided. In Germany you asked for help in churning from the butter saint, Azeca or Haseka, who had changed rancid butter into sweet by praying over it. Or you could invoke St. Brigit of Ireland, whose loving generosity enabled her to feed strangers on magically renewed stores of butter. The most common English charm, still used in 1929 and sung as the plunger was thrust up and down, went:
Come, butter, come,
Come, butter, come,
Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for a buttered cake,
Come, butter, come.
Butter, as we have already seen, often symbolizes sperm or the growth of a child in the womb. The thrusting of the churn plunger, the invocation to butter to “come,” the cosmic creativity of ghee – uses of the metaphor range from the superstitious to the sublime. The word butter is often a euphemism for “excrement” as well, since it too is formed inside and ejected from the body. Butter is riches, and can therefore represent very specifically “profit” or “money.” An interesting confirmation, all this, of Freud’s claim that we tend to dream money, excrement, and sperm interchangeably, for butter represents, as we have seen, all three.
The money-wise “know on which side their bread is buttered,” and the wasteful “butter their bread on both sides.” In the Old Testament butter is used as a hyperbole for luxury, when a rich man “washes his feet in butter” or “sees torrents of honey and butter.” Flattering words, fine and over-lavish, are used to “butter us up.” “Churning” is working hard and “butter” is the reward, in Jewish, Coptic, and probably many other proverbs. An English wedding custom was to present the couple, on their arrival at their new home, with a pot of butter to presage prosperity and fertility for the future. “Guns will make us powerful”; said Goering in 1936, “butter will only make us fat”: the statement equates guns with war, and butter with peace.
The French sell butter in a special shop, a crémerie, where one also buys milk, cream, cheese, and eggs. These are the vital but “innocent” foodstuffs: animal products, but those not obtained by spilling blood. Purity is stressed in crémenes, where all is customarily white and shiny. Most of them employ women servers: the female association with the idea of a dairy lives on. Butter appears packaged in the now-usual silver or gold foil, but often the very best of it is still served from the motte – a huge shameless tower of unwrapped voluptuousness, with gleaming facets where chunks of butter have been cut off with a wire to the specifications of the customer. It is copious and rich, rural and nostalgic, with charms to be resisted only by the extremely hygiene-bound or the fat-hating. Butter in a motte is not squared-off, brand-named, labelled, and “industrialized”: it constitutes a monumental snub to the concept of margarine.
First you took beeffat chopped with sheep’s stomachs and cows’ udders, soaked them in milk, and suspended the mixture in water and potash, at blood heat. (The idea was to “digest” the fat as a cow seems to turn her body fat into the materials from which butter is derived; the udders were meant to add the indefinable something which is lacking in fats which have not passed through a cow’s teats.) Next, you pressed the amalgamation between warmed plates so that liquid fat separated from solid. The runny part was called “oleine,” and what was left, being hard and white, was “margarine.” (Margaron and margarites mean “pearl” in Greek.) The “oleine,” which had roughly the same melting point as butter, was churned and then squeezed, gritty and oleaginous, into containers and marketed. The product soon received in English the composite name, “oleomargarine.”
The substance was invented on the Imperial Farm at Vincennes, outside Paris, in 1869. Europe had recently suffered a devastating cattle plague. Butter was difficult to get, and expensive. The French Emperor Napoleon III had offered a prize for the invention of something cheap to take the place of butter. Hippolyte Mége-Mouriés, a food chemist who had already earned two gold medals for making more bread with less flour, undertook his research with the personal support of the emperor and won the prize for his new spread. The addition of milk to the suet was what in fact gave margarine a taste with some chance of acceptability: the udders and stomachs were soon rejected as unnecessary. Almost immediately the Franco-Prussian War broke out and Mége, unable to begin producing his invention, sold the patent to the Dutch in 1871, and to the Americans and the Prussians soon after the war. It was Holland, already a world leader in butter production, which first developed the French invention.
Holland’s best customers for dairy products were the English, now more deeply enmeshed than any other society on earth in the Industrial Revolution. England’s population was exploding, and the swiftly emptying countryside could supply less and less of the nutritional needs of the vast urban conglomerates being created by the factories. The Dutch soon found that margarine was more durable than butter and therefore simpler to hold for sale and to transport. Margarine was born from, through, and for the new industrial age.
The substitute spread began as a meat product tied directly to the beef and dairy industries. In the United States, after the first margarine plant had opened in the mid 1870s in Manhattan, margarine production soon became a minor adjunct (for Americans had no trouble getting enough butter) to the giant meat-packing companies centred in Chicago. In Europe, where by the late nineteenth century the poor had increasingly to forgo butter and eat beef tallow and lard instead, the new industry found it difficult to obtain enough fat, largely because so many people were eating it “straight.” Soon beef suet had to be imported from the United States. But the market for margarine was among the poor, and buying fat made it more and more difficult to keep the price of margarine low enough so that the people who ate it could afford it.
A second dawn for the fortunes of margarine occurred between 1902 and 1915, when a method was discovered and perfected for hardening oil. The reason why animal fats congeal to spreadable (and harder) consistencies is that they have sufficient hydrogen molecules in them: they are “saturated” with hydrogen. Add hydrogen to oil – any oil – and it turns solid.
Liquid vegetable and fish oils, which until then had been unsuitable for spreading on bread, began to be perceived as raw materials for margarine. The possibilities were endless, and no time was lost in developing plantations of oil-bearing crops: oil and coconut palms, cottonseed, sunflowers, soy beans, maize, peanuts, sesame, rapeseed, even shea butter (the fruit of an African tree), babassu palms from Brazil, and olive trees. Marine oils came from whales, and from oily fish like herring, pilchards, and anchovies.
It makes no difference, as far as taste goes, which oil is used, for all individual properties of the raw materials are automatically removed in the processing. Oil seeds are crushed, heated, moistened, pressed, and filtered with the help of petroleum-based solvents so that all the meal, husks, and so on are eliminated. (These are often pressed into cakes and sold as cattle feed.) The oil is then degummed, and treated with caustic soda so that unwanted fatty acids are turned into a soapy substance and drained off. Next the oil is bleached of all colour and deodorized. It is then hydrogenated with pure hydrogen and a copper (formerly a nickel) catalyst, filtered, and refined a second time. By now the medium for the making of margarine has the same tasteless, colourless, uniform consistency no matter where the process began: at this point the milk bacteria, the aromas, and the colouring are added to make it as much like butter as possible.
Nearly all of the vegetable oils for margarine came at first from tropical countries: from places like Nigeria, the Philippines, India, and Brazil. Welcome sources of income opened up, as the rich industrialized northern populations began to eat margarine in ever-increasing amounts. Margarine is a butter substitute, invented by northern butter-eaters; it has never even tried to taste like anything except butter. People whose habits do not include the eating of butter spread on bread do not consume it themselves, but many non-butter cultures happen to be in tropical zones, precisely the areas where oil-seed crops grow best.
As aroma scientists enthusiastically got to work unlocking the secrets of butter’s attractions and trying to apply this knowledge to improvements in the palatability of margarine, more and more tropical lands were turned over to raising lucrative crops for sale to the north. As time went on, plantations began to crush their own seed, and at least partly refine the oil before selling it to the margarine factories, which always remained close to their customers in Europe and North America.
The trump cards, however, remained securely in the hands of the buyers. For margarine oils are entirely interchangeable: there is nothing infuriatingly unique about any one of them, as there is with butter-fat. Any oil will do – and therefore the margarine corporations could buy whatever oil was cheapest. Shortages, special qualities, colour, taste – none of these made the slightest difference; and alternatives were always available.
As giant food corporations formed and expanded, tropical plantations fell more and more under their control. Unilever (which began as a butter- and then a margarine-selling business) is now the world’s largest food-processing company; its revenues reached $20 billion in 1983. Unilever decides in large measure what crops will be grown, and in what quantities, in many Third World countries, particularly in Africa. International corporations like Unilever now do their own advertising (to create and sustain demand), and provide their own transportation, importing, exporting, research, and development of ideas and products. They see to it that people who can pay get what they want. The invention of margarine, where raw materials are reduced to complete neutrality and then given character by means of additives, was a major factor in the creation of the giant modern systems of food production and profit.
Meanwhile, back among the people whom margarine was designed to please, and near the beginning of this century, the battle with butter had begun in earnest. The ties of the new industrial product with meat and dairying had snapped, and now margarine began seriously to threaten butter sales. The reason was mostly that margarine was cheaper than butter. Butter producers were unwilling to lower prices since they were selling what they themselves made; margarine producers could cheapen their wares because the people who actually grew the oil seeds (as opposed to those who marketed them) could be paid little. But as prosperity mounted in the industrialized countries, Ernst Engel’s law came into force: expenditure on food does not increase in the same ratio as income, but becomes relatively lower. People learn to expect that food will be cheap; money is for spending on other things.
The butter industry had in the beginning two main advantages over margarine. One was that it was already in place, not struggling for a foothold. The other was that butter is central to the mythologies of our culture, bathed as it is in tradition, in prestige, in folklore. The taste of butter is the ideal which margarine is trying, even now, to attain. Butter is so entrenched as a basic and preferred food that margarine never turned aside to become something different from the original, but has coveted butter’s domain all along. Being a child of our times, however, margarine never accepted that the ancient mystique pertained to butter alone, and could not believe that butter was irreplaceable.
On the whole, the producers of butter fought a very dirty fight. The butter lobby sought to shut out margarine by forcing governments to tax the rival product till its price was as close as possible to butter’s. Several intensively butter-producing countries, such as Canada and New Zealand, simply forbade margarine production. (New Zealand still makes no margarine, although recently, because of margarine’s new “health” weapon, sales of it have been permitted. Canada rescinded its law in 1948, even later in some of the provinces.) Other countries insisted that no margarine be sold without an admixture of butter, to protect their dairy farmers.
The fact that poor people bought most margarine was often used insidiously to shame those who were trying not to be perceived as poor. In German towns with more than five thousand inhabitants, buyers had to go into a food shop by a separate entrance in order to get margarine, or into a partitioned-off section of the shop which everyone knew was for those who ate the cheaper stuff. The official reason for this was that butter sellers might be tempted to “adulterate” their produce with margarine if the two substances were allowed shelf contact. Margarine was packaged differently from butter – in cubes rather than bricks – and bore a tell-tale red stripe to distinguish it, in addition to the demeaning word margarine on the box.
From the very beginning, nowhere was margarine allowed to be called by a name remotely resembling the word butter. Fear of the consumers being fooled was the reason, as well as the jealous guarding by dairy interests of butter’s semi-sacred status. The United States had 180 applications for butter-substitute patents after margarine first arrived in the 1870s. The names of some of these were “oleoid,” “creamine,” “butteroid,” and “butterine.” “Butterine” was the name by which the product was first known in England. Legislation was passed in the United States in 1886 forbidding every echo of “butter,” and making “oleomargarine” the generic name – which it remained for sixty-four years. The British changed “butterine” to “margarine” by law in 1887.
Margarine, being factory made, has always been a brand-name product in the west, with fierce competition between the brands for the best, that is the most butter-like, taste. These names like to suggest nostalgia (Blue Bonnet), the regal (Imperial), the childlike and natural (Stork, Flora, Country Crock) – whatever might participate in something of the prestige of butter. Relatively rarely is the modernity of margarine stressed, as in L’Avenir (The Future) in France.
Handcuffed as it is to the concept of butteriness, margarine launched in the twenties a long-lasting series of advertisements in many languages, which showed blindfolded people trying both spreads and pronouncing, “You can’t tell the difference,” a judgement which no one who heard it at the time would have thought himself sufficiently insensitive to make. Butter, forced into publicity which has insisted more and more neurotically on its own ineffable singularity, has ended up with slogans as lame as “Only butter is butter.” In Russia, where state-controlled margarine production has grown to surpass butter production in volume as the country becomes industrialized, there are two kinds available: kitchen, and better-quality table margarine. The latter is marked with a cow on its wrapper, “to indicate the product’s uses.”
Butter’s meanest punches in the battle with the upstart began as early as 1902 in the United States, even before hydrogenation technology became available. Margarine was called a “harmful drug,” and stores had to be licensed to sell it. Butter producers primly and cunningly insisted that, since margarine was not butter, it should be prevented by every means from resembling butter. Above all, it should be denied the golden colour which, as butter had good reason to know, proves irresistible to buyers, no matter what the substance actually tastes like. Unless it wanted to bear a heavy tax, margarine had to be sold lard-white. Five of the states went so far as to have all margarine dyed pink, presumably so that no one could take it seriously, let alone eat it as a daily basic food or cook anything in it without turning the stomachs of their family and guests.
Margarine countered first of all by including in packages a tube, bag, or tablet with yellow colouring matter in it. You kneaded the dye into the white fat by hand – often imperfectly, so that the finished product had a streaky look. The job was accepted as something a man could do in the kitchen without endangering his self-esteem – like emptying garbage and sharpening knives. Presumably it did not drag him too inextricably into the “female” activity of actual cooking.
By the 1920s, when hydrogenated vegetable oil had become almost exclusively the raw material of American margarine, yellow oils had become available; if not deprived of all their colour, these could make margarine “naturally yellow,” and the tax had been circumvented. But the American dairy industry kept fighting, and in 1931 a tax was slapped on all margarine containing yellow oils; in 1934 it became illegal to use any kind of unbleached oil in margarine. Meanwhile, the role of “purity” in the butter myth was turned against it in 1923, when Congress forbade the addition to butter of any other ingredients, including those enhancing spreadability; margarine, less “pure,” rushed to embrace spread-ability, which has remained perhaps its greatest advantage (apart from cost and the cholesterol scare) in consumer preference over butter.
Further good fortune arrived for the margarine industry when the Second World War began: war is always bad for butter. During the war millions of people in Europe were forced to eat margarine rather than butter. They grumbled, but made the substitution. A butterless world was seen to be possible.
In 1950 the discriminatory taxes against margarine were lifted in the United States and the long and greasy word oleomargaine was officially changed to margarine. (Pronunciation of the g had long been softened in popular practice – presumably on an analogy with the way in which a hard g becomes soft in the name Marjorie, a derivative of Margaret. The British shorten the word to marge, with connotations which include familiarity, boredom, and contempt.) Margarine, allowed to “float” freely on the market, swiftly caught up with butter in sales, especially when the “quality” and higher-priced margarines were first introduced in 1956.
The taste of margarine began soon after the war to be improved, by leaps and bounds. Sales grew internationally. Intensive research by Unilever in the 1950s discovered hundreds of the flavour components of butter, and ways were found of synthesizing these and adding them to margarine. Lecithin, which increased plasticity, was added originally as egg yolk; later, cheaper chemicals were substituted for the egg. Margarine can now be provided with spreadability at almost any temperature, to order.
All the manipulations to which margarine is subjected make it very prone to flavour reversion. Soy bean oil, for instance, may quickly develop an interesting, but in margarine undesirable, smell of freshly cut green beans. Autoxidation because of exposure to air and light is common. The precursors of a host of persistent “off-flavours” had to be pinned down, and anti-oxidant additives devised to block them. This extraordinarily complex process of analysis and correction is known as hydro-refining.
Deprivation of butter, in the populations of the north, has always been known as one of the causes of eye problems, skin diseases, kidney stones, and rickets. The reason is butter’s richness in vitamin A, which is in short supply if few fresh vegetables and little sun are available. Vitamins A and D are now added, by law in many countries, to margarine.
The colour of butter was endlessly studied, until it was found that the addition to margarine of an orange-yellow dye with a pink tinge gave a good approximation. Margarine was often provided in North America with a pronounced yellow hue – much yellower even than coloured butter. This is usually the case where the law still prevents margarine from looking like butter – in Ontario, for instance. When margarine is permitted to resemble butter it tries to do so – and greatly gains in sales as a result. Butter generally sticks to paleness, denoting thereby the fastidious restraint of the Real Thing, which does not need to strive for effect. Margarine is not entirely defenceless, however, with its carefully cultivated shiny appearance and the obvious and immediate consumer-appeal of gold. Many aroma scientists say they are convinced that margarine is now in no respect inferior to butter, and even that it surpasses butter in colour, in plasticity, in “lustre,” and in taste. It keeps longer, and it still costs less.
Within the last five years “lightness” has become a gigantic food fad. Being thin, as we saw earlier, is a status symbol, trailing connotations of youth, modernity, health, education, and money. Just as facile and sugary art is “schmalzy” (literally, “fatty”), so being fat has come to be regarded as too easy, and as in poor taste. A thin body suggests discipline and competence in the face of a world which is perceived as ever more complicated and dangerous. The sufferings undergone by slimmers, the hours of jogging and lifting weights, the self-denial, and the acquisition of know-how required to “think thin,” are gladly undergone by the privileged classes: it is aristocratic and self-centred austerity – an entirely different matter from abstemiousness imposed by necessity. Those members of the poorer classes who want to escape their image find that being thin can be an essential first step.
“One can never be too rich or too thin” is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: “light” food. In buying “light” food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place, eat less and so measure up to the desired norm, and receive as an added bonus the suggestion that our behaviour is “enlightened.”
So a multi-million dollar business is born: “light” beer, “slimming” fast-foods and snacks, “diet” pop – and “light-tasting” margarine. Eyeing always the cost of butter, which must continue to exceed that of its rival, the “quality” light-tasting product could increase its price as consumer demand grew. Only giant corporations with their technology and machinery for subtracting calories, changing flavours, substituting materials, and, above all, publicizing the results, can manage the trick. A cow is incapable of changing its ways to conform to fashion. Margarine, on the other hand, is versatility itself.
The dairy industry, especially in Europe, has in recent years received massive support from agricultural programmes. Farmers have been assured of their livelihoods by being given a guaranteed buyer and a minimum price for their milk. In this scheme of things butter had played a large part, since butter uses a great deal of milk and can now be refrigerated and kept for months on end while some use is being sought for it. The ludicrous image of vast tonnages of luxury fat going begging – the “butter mountain” as it is called – has been the result. Margarine has, of course, played its role in the problem, but margarine producers can primly point out that margarine is much more adaptable in every way than butter is – who has heard yet of a margarine mountain? (Since 1984, the European Economic Community has imposed quotas to limit the quantity of milk produced; in the United States farmers are being encouraged to sell their herds to be killed and sold as beef.)
A growing public awareness of the role played by cholesterol in heart attacks and strokes has given margarine a further boost. Cholesterol has been studied by chemists and medical researchers for a hundred years, but only in the last decade has the name become a household word – with quite a lot of help from the margarine industry. Cholesterol, a complex alcohol compound, is necessary to the health of all our body cells. But in atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, cholesterol from excess low-density lipo-proteins in the blood forms mushy plaques which fill up the arteries, eventually block the flow of blood, and cause heart attacks or strokes. Diet is obviously an important reason for the original proclivity to the disease – although since two people may eat the same diet and only one suffer atherosclerosis, diet is not the only consideration. The condition appears to arise mainly from high consumption of animal products, including eggs, milk, and butter. Animal fats, including butter, contain cholesterol. In addition they are saturated fats, and saturated fats assist cholesterol formation by the body itself.
Margarine made from vegetable oil does not actually carry cholesterol, as butter does. Its oils may be saturated, but they may equally well (once the public has been shown that it ought to prefer unsaturated oils) be chosen for their polyunsaturated or mono-unsaturated character. Margarine would be liquid were it not hydrogenated. This process produces saturated-fat-like substances called trans-fatty acids, and these tend (like saturated fats) to cause the body itself to produce cholesterol. These are exceedingly complex chemical biological reactions, and scientists understand as yet little of their nature, let alone of their ultimate effects. In order that they may be used as a marketing ploy, however, considerable simplification must occur in the language used to describe them. Nowadays, margarine loudly proclaims its polyunsaturatedness, even though, as we shall see in the chapter on olive oil, polyunsaturatedness may soon become less sought after than mono-unsaturatedness. The dairy lobby has so far seen to it that wherever the presence of polyunsaturated oils is announced, the percentage of saturated oils must be mentioned also. What is still not included on margarine labels is notification of the presence of trans-fatty acids (whose effects are similar to those of saturated fats) in the margarine.
The very latest technology in margarine, immensely complex as it is, and having been achieved after enormous effort and expense, involves the thickening of vegetable oils without hydrogenation. The result is a reduction (though not yet an elimination) of saturated fats in the mix. The product is advertised as being utterly medicinal in character (“originally sold by doctor’s prescription”) yet “simply” delicious. It tries but fails to taste like butter.
The corn oil, the soy bean oil, and the sunflower oil industries (all of these oils are polyunsaturated) have moved massively into the production of margarine, and the public is being assiduously reminded of the terrors of cholesterol and of saturated fats (but not of trans-fatty acids), to the extreme discomfiture of the arch-rival, butter. Palm-kernel oil and coconut oil (both saturated) have suffered heavily: margarine packages admit only with embarrassment that they “may contain” one of them. It may be not without significance that palm kernels and coconuts are tropical Third World produce, whereas corn, soy beans, and sunflowers are three of the largest crops in the United States.
In North America, people now eat four times as much margarine as they eat butter. Most, if forced to consider taste alone, would probably admit they still prefer butter, but margarine, being more economical, is used in cooking processes where the fat flavour is least discernible. Wherever “gourmet” food remains or becomes the ideal, butter eclipses margarine with ease. There still exists an anti-margarine prejudice in the absolute sense: in Ontario, for example, restaurants are permitted by law to serve margarine provided they clearly publicize the fact. Under this threat, almost all of them back down and serve butter. Some people are prepared to forgo butter because of the cholesterol, although merely substituting margarine for butter would, of course, be useless unless the whole nature of one’s diet were changed as well; and if one’s diet were healthy a reasonable amount of butter would do most people no harm.
Too much cholesterol is a condition prevalent in western industrialized societies where our traditional lust for the luxury of butter plays only one note in a cacophony of strident and constant calls to consume. Margarine, butter’s fabricated image, is a wonderful mirror of certain aspects of ourselves. It was invented because we had decided to leave the countryside and live in cities, with the result that food supplies, which had to be brought to us from a distance, spoiled and became expensive. Yet we continued to yearn for butter, which had long been one of the indisputable marks of well-being. Margarine, factory-made and longer lasting than butter, was one of the earliest examples of a food artificially formulated for city living, mass production, long shelf life, nationwide distribution, and centralized warehousing. Very few people need to be employed in the manufacture of margarine.
All these characteristics made it impossible for butter to compete in price. It was forced into the category of “gourmet” eating, and threatened with losing its status as the staple. The price of butter, except for the special “cultured” variety, is kept low by margarine’s competition; there is very little money to be made these days from the marketing of butter. Meanwhile, a new élitism is being enthroned: the market for natural products (butter being only one of these) has begun to limit itself to those who are able to pay more. A new puzzle has arisen for those who can afford to be torn, this time between being Thin and Healthy (eating margarine) and being a Gourmet (eating butter). Margarine, even in North America, still lacks “class.” In addition, those who want to be Thin and Healthy usually wish to eat what is Natural, and butter is more “natural” than machine-made margarine.
The vicious, even ridiculous desperation with which butter has fought margarine in our own society is in part an index of the anxiety we experience as we watch ways of life we have loved being killed off, apparently inexorably. The struggle was – and is – theatrically symbolic. It represents the great oppositions articulated in our culture: the land versus the city, the farm (despite the extent to which dairy farming has become mechanized) versus the factory, independent versus corporately-controlled business, tradition versus not-necessarily-preferable novelty, nature versus human manipulation, labour-intensive versus machine-operated industry, uniqueness versus interchangeability.
The idea of neutralizing oil before “turning it into” something else had arrived as early as 1883, when Mark Twain, travelling down the Mississippi, overheard two “oily villains” plotting to kill butter with margarine and sell the world “cottonseed olive oil.” “‘You can’t tell it from butter,’ said the margarine man, ’by George, an expert can’t. . . . Butter’s had its day – and from this out, butter goes to the wall.’” Twain described the two as “brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion.”
Twain enunciated a distaste which has grown increasingly prevalent in the century since he wrote. We are afraid of the irreparable damage constantly being wrought by “brisk, energetic” go-getters with narrow self-interest their only concern and the lowering of standards never entering their calculations. It is not that the dairy industry is poor or innocent: it is now largely “agribusiness” just as corn is, and its steel fist has given it away time and again. But a shiver goes down our spine, just the same, at the thought of butter “going to the wall.” We are aware, as Twain was not, that it actually could happen. We respect and admire the expertise that has gone into the making and improving of margarine; we are grateful because it is cheaper than butter; but it remains hard to love margarine. To describe pastry, for instance, as “margariny” still manages to add nothing to its attraction.
Widespread information on the role of cholesterol in heart disease and the health- and status-conscious preference for “light” food, have both been used brilliantly by margarine in its battle with butter. Margarine has already achieved universal (though partial) acceptance in the kitchens of all industrialized countries, and gone a long way to closing the flavour gap with its rival. The new cholesterol weapon has cloaked margarine with much greater stature as the next act in the drama gets under way. On the other hand, a rising demand in the west for the epicurean dimensions of eating is a shot in the arm for butter, the original, the traditional, the natural and “finest.” So the drama continues, intense, unpredictable, and filled with incident. Like the very best theatre, the struggle is not only formidably balanced, but archetypal.
One recent incident in the saga has been the introduction, so far mainly for restaurant use, of “butter-flavoured” vegetable oil for cooking: margarine, in other words, but unsolidified. The advertisements righteously proclaim: “No Cholesterol.” One brand of this product praises its own “honest-to-butter” flavour. “Honesty,” to be sure, is a concept which has been stretched a long way; but the substitution of butter for God or for goodness in the slogan is hyperbolic homage indeed – as though imitation were not flattery enough.