Ode to Butter

While I do remember a period during my childhood when we had Fleischmann's margarine -- I was young enough to be mesmerized by its golden paper -- soon enough my mother was swept into the Julia Child craze and we had butter ever after. I did a lot of cooking during college, buttery cooking, and in the years after, still coasting along on Julia's influence, never veered into the world of fake spreads or margarines that were so highly promoted during the 80s and 90s. My loyalty to butter was completely about taste though. In those fat-phobic days, I figured if I was going to eat fat, it had better taste very good.


So it was a delight eventually to find out that butter is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Here's Julia Ross, in The Mood Cure:


Butter is so packed nutritionally, with its ten vitamins, ten minerals, eighteen amino acids, and eleven kinds of fat that it's hard to know where to begin. It's tremendously high in vitamin A, which it helps deliver to your eyes (night vision is absolutely dependent on an adequate vitamin A supply). Vitamin A regulates the female sex hormone progesterone too, providing many mood as well as fertility benefits. Then there's butter's butyrate, the fastest burning of all fats. This very special fatty acid is used extensively in your brain. For one thing, it serves as a base for making GABA, your natural Valium. It can also protect you from colon cancer and is used in medicine in precancerous colon problems to do just that.


And here's Sally Fallon Morell in Nourishing Traditions:


Fat-Soluble Vitamins: These include true vitamin A or retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K and vitamin E as well as their naturally occurring cofactors needed to provide maximum benefit. Butter is America's best source of these important nutrients. In fact, vitamin A is more easily absorbed and utilized from butter than that from other sources....Butter added to vegetables and spread on bread, and cream added to soups and sauces, ensure proper assimilation of the minerals and water-soluble vitamins in vegetables, grains, and meat.


The advice we've been getting for decades to avoid butter in favor of polyunsaturated oils is doubly poor because not only do we miss out on all the benefits described by Ross and Morell, but the fats widely used to replace butter are a nutritional disaster (I'll get to polyunsaturated oils in a future post). For list of healthy fats and a list of fats to avoid like the plague, go here. For more on the health benefits of butter from the Weston Price Foundation, go here.


I don't want to come across as someone who would urge you to eat stuff like lentil loaf in a single-minded focus on health. I'm all about the taste, and no question, butter is where the taste is. I've finally discovered, since it was my mother who was cooking Julia and not me, that the way top restaurants make their food so fantastic is just...butter. Lots and lots of butter. A really good dish can rise to unimagined heights with extra butter. One of my favorites is Matt Stone's Creamy Grits. It's a great dish for cold weather, and sending the kids off to school with full happy bellies, but I'm so devoted to it I made it even during this summer's heat wave. Usually I put a big handful of grated cheddar in there instead of the parmesan. And lots and lots and lots of butter.