The well-deserved revival of butter

It’s now almost a decade since food giant Unilever got out of margarine production. The inventors of Flora saw the writing on the wall and cut their losses as the rehabilitation of long-demonised butter and other dairy fats moved relentlessly forward. In doing so, perhaps they also anticipated the revelations that have since been made about ultra-processed foods. Margarine and “spreads” are the very definition of ultra-processing.

Butter’s negative reputation began in 1913 when Russian pathologist Prof Nikolai Anitschkow conducted an experiment in which he fed large amounts of cholesterol to a group of rabbits, which led to atherosclerosis. Rabbits are herbivores by nature and are not designed to process cholesterol, which made them particularly vulnerable to these effects.

Ancel Keys, in the 1940s, continued with his lipid hypothesis, using cherry-picked statistics and ignoring inconvenient figures, to establish a link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease.

Research

Scroll down to 2018 and the conclusion of a study (BMJ 2018;362:k3862) by scientists at McMaster University in Canada: “Our findings support that consumption of dairy products might be beneficial for mortality and cardiovascular disease, especially in low- and middle-income countries where dairy consumption is much lower than in North America or Europe.”

The British Medical Journal provided the following summary: “People who consume more than two servings of dairy products each day have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality than those with lower intakes, a global observational study has reported.”

My history with butter

Did this have any effect on my own relationship with butter? Of course not. I had long been suspicious of the vested interests involved in the demonisation of dairy products and it was not lost on me that much dietary research was funded by companies whose business is food processing. I was also conscious that Irish people, for generations, ate prodigious quantities of butter, and also cooked with it, along with other animal fats like lard and dripping.

When I was a small boy in the 1960s this was starting to change. My parents resisted the TV commercials for Blue Band “the margarine that spreads straight from the fridge” and stuck with butter. But my mother used blocks of hydrolysed vegetable fats, packed with transfats, in her baking and I recall Mazola corn oil making an appearance.

Those were the days before olive oil, of course. If you read Elizabeth David back then – and my mother, an excellent cook, didn’t – her advice in A Book of Mediterranean Food was to seek out such exotic ingredients in Old Compton Street in Soho. When my mother first used olive oil in the kitchen, it came from the local chemist’s where it was sold for softening ear wax rather than dressing salads. The mind boggles as to how it tasted.

Later, there were small bottles of olive oil with the Goodall’s label. I got my first whiff of the distinctive aroma of warm olive oil, in a pan, in this form.

Well, we are a very long way from there now, although you can still buy Mazola and (reformulated) Blue Band if you really want to.

Between the cupboard and the fridge, our stock of fats is pretty simple. There’s olive oil – the basic one from Aldi – for frying, various extra virgins (mainly Greek and Spanish) for dressings and flavour, roasted sesame oil, butter, and James Whelan Butchers’ beef dripping (which is sold in Fortnum & Mason and Harrods, incidentally).

Better with butter

But, ah, butter! It’s hard to beat. Just think of hot buttered toast, perhaps with Marmite or Gentleman’s Relish. Toasted crumpets with honey. New potatoes cooked with a little fresh mint then split and generously anointed with butter and a touch of sea salt. Asparagus, globe artichokes, peas, new season carrots. None of these would be the same with even the best olive oil.

When I make a ragù – often called a bolognese sauce – (and always with tagliatelle, ever since I visited Bologna) and have let it bubble away for hours, the final addition is always a big knob of butter. And when I cook spaghetti aglio e olio, which is simply garlic, olive oil, and parsley with pasta, I do something that is probably against the law in Italy: I melt in some butter just before dishing it up and lashing on the grated Parmesan.

Amongst my favourite more conventional applications of butter are beurre noisette where butter is melted and heated just until it browns a little, developing a caramelised flavour. A little lemon juice is then squeezed in and perhaps some capers added. There is nothing better with a sole on the bone. Browned butter with crisped sage leaves is also the classic accompaniment for ravioli, especially when filled with ricotta and spinach.

Two essential, luxurious classic sauces depend on butter for their key character: Béarnaise and hollandaise. This is how I make mine. Take half a pound of butter from the fridge and cut into small cubes an hour before you want to make the sauce.

For hollandaise, take a tablespoon of white wine vinegar and add it to three tablespoons of water in a small saucepan along with a dessert spoon of finely chopped shallot and a few crushed peppercorns. Reduce it to one tablespoon and allow to cool.

Strain into a double boiler, over hot, but certainly not boiling water, and mix with the yolk of an egg and stir until the mixture covers the back of a spoon – be careful not to overheat! Now whisk in the butter, two or three cubes at a time and when all is combined, you have a hollandaise sauce. For béarnaise, start with tarragon vinegar (or just add some fresh tarragon leaves) and proceed in the same way.

Broadly speaking, hollandaise is good with fish, béarnaise with steak. Both are… well, simply fabulous. And a very effective way of boosting your butter intake!

WINE OF THE MONTH

Chardonnay is the only grape I’ve ever known to exhibit a “buttery” character and Penfolds Max’s Chardonnay 2019 (€24.95, O’Brien’s), named in honour of the great Australian winemaker, Max Schubert, is a case in point. But, of course, there’s more to it than that, including a subtly toasty touch of oak and refreshingly cool climate fruit thanks to the altitude of the Adelaide Hills vineyards. If you like white Burgundy, but despair at the prices, this is not quite the same, but certainly heading in the same direction.