Why butter is just better, no matter the cost
Bread-and-margarine pudding just doesn't have the same ring to it, says food writer Denise Irvine.
I was at my local supermarket this week, contemplating the choices in the butter section of the chiller. A man with a plastic shopping basket was doing the same thing: “These are crazy prices,” he said. “And so say all of us,” I replied.
Nowadays it is easy to bond over butter at the supermarket due to the cost of a not-so-humble 500g pack increasing significantly over the past year, and recent Statistics New Zealand data recording a hike of 65.3 percent in the 12 months to April.
The man and I didn’t exactly spell all this out but we grimaced at the numbers in front of us and I guess we’d both read about the reasons for them, a kind of perfect storm of dairy price increases, local supply constraints and rising production costs.
Butter has become a luxury for many New Zealanders in recent months due to high prices.
Monika Grabkowska for Unsplash
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Recently, in a culinary emergency while staying out-of-town, I paid an eye-watering $11 for a pack of butter at a suburban dairy. The alternative was to try the DIY shake-in-a-jar method but that sounded like seriously hard work.
Meanwhile, at the supermarket, the man beside me picked up a 500g pack of Woolworths Salted Butter ($8.49), held it briefly, put it back on the shelf, grabbed a pack of Mainland Salted ($10.89), and muttered to himself (or me), “this is much better,” and walked away with it.
I went for the middle-of-the-road Anchor, on special at $9.90, and of course there were multiple of tubs of plant-based spreads available, all substantially cheaper, including the olive oil spread Olivani, which is the one I’d typically buy.
It also was on special, $4.80/500g, way less than the Anchor, but I’ve gone off Olivani after using it recently to make a batch of Anzac biscuits when I’d run out of butter. And being (unhappily) reminded that there are circumstances when only the real thing will do.
Anzac biscuits made without butter aren't a patch on the real thing, says Denise Irvine.
Denise Irvine
The Anzac biscuits looked good but they lacked the unique next-level flavour, or alchemy, that you get when you put the beautiful complexity of butter in the mix. To quote Isabella Beeton in her weighty Book of Household Management (my grandmother’s copy, the New Edition 1906): “The taste of butter is peculiar, and very unlike any other fatty substance. It is extremely agreeable when of the best quality.”
So worrying prices aside, here’s a brief account of why there is always a place for butter in my fridge. Along with its distant cousin Olivani because it will eventually be forgiven and such products are always to be commended for their convenience, their more modest cost and their appeal to those avoiding dairy products.
When margarine and similar first became available in New Zealand last century, it was a complete novelty. It was so much easier to spread than a chunk of hard butter on a freezing winter morning and it was utterly expedient to apply a swoosh of marge to my kids’ school lunch sandwiches. A thick layer of peanut butter or strawberry jam would completely mask the slightly artificial, thin-ish taste, I reasoned.
Margarine is easier to spread, but it doesn't have butter's flavour or texture.
There were also ramped up health warnings around this time about the saturated fats lurking within a pack of butter, and substitutes were being widely recommended. So for a while I pretty much ditched the prerequisite butter dishes and fancy silver butter knives of my own childhood and turned to plant-based offerings.
I had an epiphany after idly reading the back of a pack of one such product and counting eight different ingredients including an emulsifier, preservative, acidity regulator, and flavouring and colouring.
In comparison, the sidelined salted butter listed two ingredients: Cream (milk) and salt, and of course there was the unlisted business of its buttery, velvety taste and quality that enhances the flavour and mouth-feel of so many foods.
Bread and butter pudding without butter? Unthinkable, says Denise Irvine.
Supplied/Vanessa Baxter
I’m talking here about mashed potatoes, bread and butter pudding, springtime asparagus, a fresh summer cob of corn, poached egg on buttery toast, béchamel sauce, fried mushrooms and onions, ditto crumbed fish, and baking in all its forms. Why would you swap something so simple and perfect for second best?
I re-read the health warnings on butter which suggest that while it is certainly better for our hearts to replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats, that using small amounts every now and then shouldn’t be a problem for most people.
So I went back to butter, in moderation, for most occasions and I hope that I’m “most people” because as the lovely old A A Milne poem says, I really do like a little bit of butter on my bread. Even if the price of this Kiwi staple ingredient has gone clear through the supermarket roof.
* Denise Irvine is a Waikato journalist and food writer.
