Nothing beats it

Sylvia Carter |
A La Carter

November 8, 2006

The day I got my smallpox vaccination, in a nearby Mississippi River town, my father brought home a big mess of river catfish.

The kitchen table was stretched to its full length with all the leaves in, and we invited my aunt and uncle and cousins from across the road to come for a fried-fish supper.

At 5, I was big enough to butter my own bread, but because my arm hurt, my cousin Willa Mae babied me and buttered it for me, with butter our grandmother had churned. The bread, too, was homemade, by my mother.

I took full advantage, as children will do, and asked Willa Mae to butter more and more bread, until I was completely full and happy. I remember with blissful clarity the taste of that bread and butter with the crisp, golden fish.

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I have always steadfastly championed butter, and it now seems that the world is poised to join me and a few steadfast others.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," wrote that, in her family, "we buttered everything from broccoli to brownies, and would have buttered butter itself if it were not for the problems of traction presented by the butter-butter interface. . . . I still regard bread as a vehicle for butter and chicken as an excuse for gravy or, when served cold, mayonnaise."

Ehrenreich, who wrote this in her column in The Progressive, a magazine whose name expresses its sentiments, is a size 6 and has a cholesterol level "that an envious doctor once denounced as 'too low.'"

Of late, butter has been vindicated. Down with margarine (bad for you), up with butter (it just may be good for you).

On the matter of butter, I defer to my late colleague Roy Hanson. Since it is socially unacceptable to sit down and eat a stick of butter all by itself, Hanson once wrote in Newsday, there is a need for certain foods that can be used as a raison de beurre, or reason for butter. Potatoes, wrote Hanson, though satisfying with butter, really are not quite plain enough to be a true raison. The purpose of a raison is simply to soak up a maximum amount of butter. But grits - those are a raison for butter if ever there was one. (Hanson died of lung cancer, not butter, by the way.)

To prepare a raison de beurre, you take 1 stick of butter and 1 raison. Melt the butter and pour it over the raison. Makes 1 serving.

Our good Jersey cow Goldie (later another Goldie, a Guernsey) gave us milk with cream that rose to the top, and that was the cream that went into the butter my grandmother churned at least once a week, sometimes twice.

She skimmed the cream and then sat down at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table with the Dazy churn in her lap and churned until yellow clumps appeared. While she worked, she said the ancient rhyme that is believed to make butter "come" faster:

Come, butter, come,

Sylvie's at the gate,

Waiting for a butter cake.

Or she might say, "Willa's waiting for a butter cake." We did have a yard gate, and she could look out at it from her place at the table.

Using a butter paddle carved for her mother by her own grandfather and made smooth by long use, Grandma pushed the butter against the sides of a green-and-yellow-speckled bowl until the liquid - true buttermilk - was pressed out. Then she patted the butter down into a glass refrigerator dish and carved a freehand design on top.

If you want to make butter that approximates my grandmother's, you need to find someone who has a cow. Forget Holsteins; the milk they give is poor in cream. Think Guernsey, Jersey or Brown Swiss. Second best to a neighbor who owns a cow would be Butterworks Farm's Sweet Jersey Cream, which has a picture of a placid Jersey cow on the label and is sold at Fairway in Plainview .

You don't need a churn. You can shake the cream in a clean jar with a tight lid until you have butter, or you can churn it using a mixer.

My grandmother lived to be 99, and she never skimped on butter, heavy cream or lard in her pie crust. I'm not worried.