Butter

To my parents,

Clare, who first buttered my bread,

and Eugene,

who taught me to savor it.

BUTTER

a poem by Elizabeth Alexander

My mother loves butter more than I do,

more than anyone. She pulls chunks off

the stick and eats it plain, explaining

cream spun around into butter! Growing up

we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon

and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,

butter melting in small pools in the hearts

of Yorkshire puddings, butter better

than gravy staining white rice yellow,

butter glazing corn in slipping squares,

butter the lava in white volcanoes

of hominy grits, butter softening

in a white bowl to be creamed with white

sugar, butter disappearing into

whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,

butter melted and curdy to pour

over pancakes, butter licked off the plate

with warm maple syrup. When I picture

the good old days I am grinning greasy

with my brother, having watched the tiger

chase his tail and turn to butter. We are

Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite

historical revision, despite

our parents’ efforts, glowing from the inside

out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

PROLOGUE

NORBU MARCHES UP THE STEEP SLOPE, TRYING TO catch up to his mother. The three-year-old carries a small bowl and a look of determination. His blue plastic boots slip often on the dewy turf, but he steadies himself and keeps on, his little body leaning into the tall rise of earth. The boy is headed toward a flat ridge about two hundred yards above where a small herd of yak are gathered. This is a familiar hike for Norbu; every morning he makes the ascent to claim his breakfast—a bowl of warm yak milk that his mother will dispense from the animals.

By the time the boy reaches the ridge, his father, Kado, and mother, Choney, have just begun their daily two-person operation of plein air milking. Norbu knows to stand by as this familiar negotiation of man and beast unfolds. He climbs a wobbly side of the small bamboo-fenced corral surrounding a group of restless calves. Inside, his father ropes one of the young animals by the neck and leads it out a makeshift gate, pushing back other calves that crowd near the opening. They’re hungry for the milk of the mother yaks lingering outside the fence.

But Choney takes the first share of milk. With a wooden pail hung from a rope around her neck, she aims to collect about six gallons of raw, whole milk to fill her churn for butter making this afternoon. Here in Bhutan, yak butter is a virtual currency, the gold of nomadic highland yak herders like Kado and Choney who sell or trade it for rice, tea, barley, and other bare necessities. As the number of these high-altitude herders dwindles in Bhutan, the appearance of yak butter—often bundled in thick green leaves and tied with bits of string—is increasingly rare in the towns and cities. Norbu’s parents can sell theirs for twice the price of cow’s butter made in the valleys. Locals place a premium on handmade yak butter not just because it’s traditional but because it’s considered healthier and better tasting, especially in their su ja (black tea whisked with butter and salt). Having loyal customers in the lowlands, Choney’s butter is often sold even before she’s churned it.

But before this precious butter can be made, let alone change hands far below in the valley, the female yak (locally called dri [pronounced “dree”])—must first be induced to give their milk to the cause. That is the work this early morning, like countless mornings before. Mother dri don’t readily cooperate with milking, even when it’s a routine maneuver as it is for this herd. Maternal instinct dictates that they withhold the milk in their udder for a calf. So to start the “let down” of milk this morning, Choney and Kado use an ancient dairy ploy: One at a time, Kado brings a calf out of the corral, prompting its mother to slowly sidle up alongside her babe. (Domesticating these massive animals is all about shepherding their offspring; yaks will never desert their young.) Kado allows the calf to suckle for a minute, which triggers the release of milk. Then he quickly pulls the young animal off the teat with his rope as Choney steps in; she briefly strokes the flank of the dri—a kind of preemptive milking signal—and then kneels beside the udders. She wears a full-length Bhutanese kira, essentially a wrap skirt with a red fleece jacket and red wool cap; it’s August, but the temperature hasn’t yet edged above 40°F. As Choney sits on her heels, balancing the pail in her lap, she begins milking by first wiping the dri’s teats with a wet rag. She wraps her fingers around two teats and alternately pulls and squeezes in a fast, steady rhythm. Dual streams of milk swish into the pail.

The calf, meanwhile, strains against the rope to be with its mother, hungry for more milk. But its mom is indifferent now; she stands placidly as if being milked by Choney is somehow hypnotic. Beneath her thick horns, she gazes east at the horizon. Under a cobalt sky the rounded arcs of land covered in whiskery grass repeat endlessly, endlessly; for the yak, it represents a continuous buffet.

When Choney has mostly emptied the mother’s udders, she slowly backs away, then Kado releases the calf, letting it lunge toward the mother for its remaining meal. Besides getting the morning leftovers of milk, the young yak are free to trail their mothers all day long, suckling at will, in the open pastures. It’s only at night that the calves are separated in the corral, ensuring that the herders get first dibs at the day’s early tide of milk. By contrast, most modern dairy farmers in the West would collect every ounce of their cow’s milk; calves are typically fed with man-made rations until they can graze. But nomadic dairymen in Bhutan split the milk capital since buying rations is cost prohibitive and impractical. It’s a delicate dairy time-share but one that has sustained preindustrial men and their livestock for millennia.

Norbu is whining for his bowlful of milk. As Choney pours the milk from her small wooden pail into a larger plastic barrel, the boy thrusts out his little bowl to intercede in the transfer. “Na ong…na,” he says (“Milk, yes…milk”). His mom fills the bowl halfway. Norbu holds it to his lips and drains it instantly, going back for a refill and then another.

Finally satisfied, he drops his bowl and dashes to a pile of small rocks. As he tosses them about, his parents continue their quiet work. Hardly a word is exchanged between them. Having descended from countless generations of herding families in these high mountains, both Choney and Kado handle the mighty animals reflexively, whose nature is more familiar to them than the ways of their own twenty-something contemporaries seven thousand feet below in Thimpu, the rapidly modernizing capital of the country.

When the milking is done, Choney’s large plastic barrel is nearly full. With one shout of “Jogay!” (“Let’s go!”), Kado sends the yak down the ridge, in the direction of lower pastures. The animals file past the family’s two-room stone shelter in a small notch, then over the mountain stream that runs beside it. In one long black shaggy procession, the beasts move over the neighboring slope. Meanwhile, Kado and Choney carry the barrel of milk to the stream and partly submerge it in a cool deep pool. The softly tumbling cold water will eventually chill the milk slightly, making it easier to churn. As Norbu and his parents disappear behind the door of their home, the last dark shapes of the yak vanish over a mountain rim. So ends the first act of Bhutanese butter making—appropriating the animal milk.

Its choreography might appear to be the start of a butter story particular to this time and place, a remote mountainside so unlike other dairy vales elsewhere in the world. But, in fact, the steps are both universal and timeless. Choney and Kado’s milking routine not only replays centuries of dairy practice in Bhutan, but it also allows a rare glimpse at the origins of butter. Long before early people settled into dairy farming, they were nomadic hunters who came to realize that it was better to keep certain animals than to kill them. Yak, as well as horses, sheep, and goats, were among the first beasts trained to submit to milking by a new class of shepherds and herders. In practice, these people worked no differently than Choney and Kado. The method for milking a beast in the pasture was identical. And once milk was at hand, stored in various primitive vessels, butter making became a serendipitous accident waiting to happen. Very likely, the first-ever churning was the result of milk’s early rough ride on the back of a pack animal, inside a skin sack, where it rocked and bounced its way to butterhood. Every churning since then—no matter how refined the technology—has essentially been a reenactment of that first lucky happenstance, the birth of butter.

Choney turns her milk into butter using one of the earliest models invented for getting the job done—a plunger churn. It goes by many different names around the world, but the design is standard: a tall, slim wooden bucket covered with a tight doughnut-shaped lid, its center hole just wide enough to fit the handle of a long wooden staff—called the plunger. The bottom end of the plunger is fitted with a crosspiece of wood. The milk or cream is churned into butter by rhythmically pumping this crosspiece up and down. That’s it. Assuming the temperature of the liquid is right, grains of butter will eventually start to materialize.

Choney’s three-foot-tall churn—a wedding present from her family—is positioned under a small skylight, the only source of daylight, apart from the front door, in an otherwise windowless stonewalled room. The family’s two-room home feels like a bunker. And in many ways it is, built by hand to withstand the snow and icy thaw in winter that completely engulfs this treeless mountaintop. There is no furniture. Since they move seasonally, Choney and Kado own only what can be carried on the backs of their yak. A fire pit burns on one side of the room. The family sleeps on the floor, atop thick ruglike blankets that Choney has woven from yak hair. During the day the blankets are stacked neatly in a corner. Wooden shelves on two sides of the room are lined with a few large bowls and pots, plus several tall baskets. On this day, two of the baskets are nearly filled with rounds and wedges of yak butter and semihard cheese. Soon Kado will make the daylong trek down to the city to trade these dairy goods for cash.

As Choney transfers the chilled raw whole yak milk into the churn, Kado prepares butter tea for two men who have come to visit—a farmer from the lowlands and a young man who heads the nomadic community in this region. Kado lifts a pot of salted tea off the fire and adds a lump of butter. He rubs the handle of a bamboo whisk back and forth between his palms to spin the ball end inside the tea. The mixture becomes frothy, the opaque color of butterscotch; he serves it in small teacups. Butter tea can be a pungent, oily drink if the butter is rancid, but Kado’s version is sublime, with just a hint of salt and a silken butteriness.

Having fastened the lid of the churn to the base with rags and twine, Choney’s butter making begins. She stands gripping the plunger, one hand on top of the other, and moves it smoothly up and down like a piston. A thick slushing sound accompanies each rise and fall of the plunger as it plows through gallons of milk in the churn. The technique is simple, but the task is laborious. It’s like creating a storm in a bucket, a tempest strong enough to forge solid butter from milky liquid. There’s no timer, no clock, just the changing sound of the churn to announce when the butter has started to form. Just before the milk surrenders its fat, the churning becomes muffled, softer, as air meets milk. Then when the butter finally comes, the noise is louder, more percussive. Such acoustics have guided butter makers around the world and throughout history. It’s a very old tune, yet one that reliably signals when waves of milk have yielded rafts of butter.

ONE

Grass, Cud, Cream

BEGINNING THE BUTTER TRIP

The Epping butter is most highly esteemed in London and its neighbourhood; great part of it is made from cows which feed during the summer months in Epping Forest, where the leaves and shrubby plants are understood greatly to contribute to its superior flavour.

—JOSIAH TWAMLEY, Essays on the Management of Dairy, 1816

ILIVE BETWEEN TWO SMALL DAIRY FARMS IN UPSTATE New York. At both ends of the dirt road that fronts my house, cows amble up and down the slanted pastures most of the year, chewing on the landscape. I often marvel at how their bodies transform the raw weeds and green of the field into snow-white milk. The fact that their milk is laden with the supple fat that men conjure into golden butter seems all the more incredible. There’s a Rumpelstiltskin-like magic to these dairy conversions. Even if modern science can explain the processes in cold detail, I find them no less dazzling. In fact, as I discovered writing this book, knowing all the intricate workings of animal nature and human endeavor that turn plant life into butter only added to my fascination.

And yet butter is uniformly taken for granted. It is common, after all. The girl next door, lovely but overlooked. Even for me, a food professional with more than two decades of experience as a pastry chef, test kitchen editor, and food writer, butter had long lived in the culinary shadows. My work paid and trained me to seek out the exotic, the celebrity foods, the Next Big Thing. Not a simple yellow stick that’s in everyone’s fridge. Although I cooked and baked often with butter and always had it on the table, I hardly gave this dairy staple much thought. It wasn’t until several years ago, when I was assigned an editorial project to taste, describe, and rate about two dozen different brands from creameries around the world, that I did a double take on butter. On the tasting table were bricks of butter from as far away as New Zealand, Italy, the Czech Republic, Ireland, and France, plus domestic brands from Vermont, Wisconsin, California, and places in between. At the time, the task seemed like a redundant one. Butter is so elemental, I thought, how different from one another could they really be?

But as I examined and tasted each sample, I was surprised that no two were alike. I found nuances in color, consistency, milkiness, salt content, sweetness, acidity, freshness, even nutty and herbal notes. Some glistened; others were matte. Some butters slumped as they sat at room temperature, others stood firm. Several had a fresh, lactic taste while a few were cultured and more tangy. One was made from the milk of goats, another from water buffalo. Cataloging this global collection, with their odd labels and unfamiliar names, I began to sense that these sticks and bricks represented both the universal and the particular of this thing we call butter (which has at least fifty-seven aliases around the world; see appendix B). All the products were essentially made the same way—from churning milk fat—yet each sample was distinguishable from another. It was as if every butter brand was a kind of message in a bottle, relaying a distinct sense of place.

It turns out that my impression wasn’t just a romantic one. Every detail of a particular butter’s character is indeed formed from the unique commingling of three living variables: man, plant, and beast. They work as a kind of relay team, beginning with the plant forage (or ration) that feeds the dairy animal, which in turn gives milk to the farmer, who then supplies the butter maker with cream, which is then churned into butter (and buttermilk). In combination, all of these individual players and conditions account for both the subtle and substantial butter differences I detected on the tasting table that day. As this trio of live factors varies from one place and time to another, sweet butter can express locality in a very pure, direct way. (Other dairy products, like yogurt and cheese, can make a similar claim, but these fermented products generally require more time and biological intervention to produce. Uncultured butter, on the other hand, can be borne almost immediately.)

Before dairy industrialization began in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century, the local terroir of a butter was much in evidence; every farmhouse was in essence a tiny artisan creamery, dispensing its version of the stuff (for better or worse). But by the twentieth century—the era when men and machines would completely displace generations of farm wives and dairymaids in the production of butter—the new milk co-ops and automated creameries ushered in conformity, consistency, and a new standard of freshness. As this industrial dairy model grew, butter from the factory churn came to reflect the technology of megaproducers rather than the terroir of local farms and small-scale makers. National brands emerged, which meant you could buy butter in, say, Michigan that tasted identical to one on the shelf in Maryland. (We’ve come to take this convenient uniformity for granted too, but it’s a very recent phenomenon in the long arc of dairy history.)

Now, in the twenty-first century, technology has been thrown in reverse. A “slow butter” revivalism is emerging, especially where the demand for local products and the lure of artisan food is high. The ranks of these new outliers on the buttermaking scene include mostly entrepreneurial low-tech dairy folk looking to sustain their farms and way of life. But there’s also a sizable troupe of chefs, avid foodists, and staunch do-it-yourselfers—all batch-churning their own microbutters for an enthusiastic niche of eaters.

Lauding this movement is not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with industrial butter production. Indeed, as detailed in chapter 6, the advent of dairy factories in the late nineteenth century greatly raised butter standards across the board and gave it a new threshold of freshness. But whenever a traditional food is rediscovered by artisans, we stand to gain interesting choices, perchance even more delicious, creative, and/or healthful ones. (Consider the modern bread revolution, for example, or the neochocolate scene.) Politically there can be benefits as well, when we get to vote our values by buying less processed, more locally crafted foods that short cut the farm-to-fork journey.

Butter allows another kind of trip too. For the inquisitive eater who savors more than just the taste of things, butter’s story is a ticket to appreciating the mighty role a simple food can play in the course of human events. One of the oldest of man-made edibles, butter’s history is our history. In part, the purpose of this book is to show how the life and times of butter have been deeply entwined with much that has gone on far from the kitchen and creamery. Beginning with early butter practices devised for the religious, spiritual, and medicinal needs of communities, to its impact on empire building and technology of the Industrial Revolution, and later to butter’s twentieth-century battle with margarine makers and fat-free zealots, this is a food, unlike any other, whose history reveals our ambitions as much as our appetite.

The contemporary butter world, in all its multicultural wonder, is no less remarkable. In the course of doing research for this book, I traveled on three continents and across the United States, each stop adding another strong thread to the weave of butter’s modern narrative. Of course, I also gleaned many facts about butter from books, articles, and online sources, but for the full sensorial experience of butter and the people and regions it comes from, I had to dust off my passport. To see the making of butter from water buffalo milk in Punjab, India, and taste it fresh from the churn was nothing like watching and sampling sheep butter making in California and cow’s butter in Brittany and industrial butter making in Wisconsin.

Front-line food study like this is called field research, but to me it was more like butter hunting. Capturing firsthand details helped me construct a time capsule of butter life as it exists now, as well as record some of the ancient methods that are rapidly disappearing in many remote areas, where new generations have eschewed their parents’ subsistence chores and occupations. Working the butter beat also led me to some interesting encounters on the fringes of dairydom. I met with a former Buddhist nun to learn about the intricacies of Tibetan butter carving, and with various scientists to understand udders, soil, and fat metabolism. I spent a week in a large fridge with the artist who sculpts the Iowa State Fair butter cow each year, and I met with a New Jersey man to see his vast personal collection of vintage butter making equipment and ephemera. I’ve toured the Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, the Maison du Beurre in Brittany, and gazed up at the infamous Butter Tower in Rouen, France. And in bakeries, restaurants, and culinary schools, I’ve watched chefs work their magic with butter.

Still, the most essential players in the story of butter aren’t the people or institutions that I’ve met or who appear at various points in its timeline. That honor goes to the animals that first make the milk that begets butter. The true provenance of butter isn’t just cultural; it’s also anatomical.

WE OWE THE PLEASURE of every buttery morsel to a legion of four-legged farmstead moms. Because these udder-equipped mothers start to make milk as soon as their newborns arrive and for many months after, we have become the beneficiaries of a seemingly perpetual lactic supply. From this daily cascade of animal milk, butter makers extract the richest portion—cream—to churn into the solids we call butter. (It’s possible to churn whole, nonhomogenized milk into butter too, but the process takes much longer and is trickier to manage.)

Considering what causes maternity and milk in the first place, one might argue that butter actually begins with sex, usually with the tryst of a bull and cow that makes a baby calf. And more than a century ago that would have been true. But since the invention of artificial insemination for livestock, this carnal connection to butter is no longer a given. Either by philosophical choice or by necessity, only small dairies (including goat and sheep operations) rely on animal attraction to trigger pregnancy and thereby lactation. Otherwise, many dairy gals never even see a bull (or buck or ram)—let alone cavort with one.

Although maternity flips the switch of milk production in many species all across the world, none make it so abundantly as the kinds of livestock that have become synonymous with dairy farming. Cows especially, but producers also count on the milk from sheep, goats, yak, buffalo, and camels. All of these animals belong to a mixed race of champion milk makers known as ruminants, who share some distinct anatomical features: a three- or four-sectioned stomach and a mouth equipped with an upper “dental pad” instead of teeth. It’s these unique body parts—which serve to harvest and ferment plants—that make the lactating ruminant a virtual processing plant on legs, able to turn whole fields of green into butter-fat-laden milk. Ruminant milk varies as much as the mothers that produce it. A ewe, for example, will give milk with twice the fat content of cow’s milk; goat’s milk has fat molecules that are smaller and more digestible, but it lacks carotene so goat butter is white; milk from a yak has less milk sugar (lactose) and more protein than cow’s milk; camel’s milk is similar to goat’s milk in composition, but it can have up to three times as much vitamin C; and the milk of water buffalo has 100 percent more fat than cow’s milk.

Cheese makers have long used the idiosyncrasies in different animal milks to their advantage—think of all the choices