Better Believe It’s Butter

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I was tasting, I think it was about 10 or 12 different butters, and I was surprised by the nuances between the butters, you know, differences in taste and texture and flavor, of course.

And I hadn't really expected that, given that butter is essentially made from one ingredient, cream.

Have any of you noticed this, that some butter, like butter you might get at a restaurant, it tastes amazing?

Or am I just weird?

Cynthia, you know the answer to that one.

Yes, you are just weird.

But what's also weird is that, you know, I've done olive oil tastings, I've compared the flavors of different olive oils I'm dipping my bread into, but it had never occurred to me to do the same thing with butter.

Butter is just butter.

Luckily, it did occur to Elaine Kosrova.

She wrote an entire book on the subject.

Yes, there really is enough butter, science, and history and deliciousness to write a book on it.

It's called Butter, a Rich History.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And as you have probably guessed, today's episode is all about butter.

Thanks to our fabulous volunteer, Ari Lebowitz, for the suggestion.

Turns out, butter is a thing of many mysteries.

Like, why is it yellow when cream is white or cream-colored?

What does butter have to do with female empowerment?

And why was margarine once colored pink and black?

Answers to those questions, plus my post-podcast retirement plan making bison butter, all in today's show.

So, what does cause all those differences that Elaine noticed in her butter tasting?

The differences in color and flavor?

There's this whole sort of constellation of factors, and it's the breed of the cow, the point they are in their lactation,

what they're eating, the grain versus grass.

Cows fed on grain have a whiter butter whereas grass will make it more yellow.

There's beta-carotene in grass which is a yellow pigment and in spring when the grass is young and tender and easy to break down cows absorb more of that beta-carotene.

So grazing cows on fresh spring grass gives their butter an even more golden tone.

What cows eat affects the flavor too.

Cows in Isigny in Normandy, France graze near the sea marshes and the iodine and other elements there give the butter a particular minerality that it's famous for.

And that change can be seasonal too.

Traditionally, in the mountainous parts of Europe, dairy herders would bring their cattle up to the higher, wilder pastures for the summer months.

The animals would feed on alpine grasses and wildflowers up at elevation, and that made the butter taste different too, and even have a different nutritional profile.

The breed of the cow affects the butter, half of the fat and the final product comes from the cow's diet, and half of it comes from the cow's own body fat.

It's assembled in the mammary gland, and the length of the chains of the fatty acids vary from breed to breed, so that affects the butter.

We're talking about cow's milk butter.

In the West, that's usually the type of butter we're eating.

But it's not the only kind of butter there is.

You can make butter from the milk of what Elaine calls champion milk makers.

These are all ruminants.

They have multiple stomachs to process grass and really break it down and ferment it.

Which is how they turn grass and wildflowers, which is a pretty low-fat diet, into creamy, delicious milk.

It's all done by the bacteria that live in their stomach chambers that break everything down and reassemble it into lovely, lovely fatty acids.

These ruminants are absolute champs at converting fields of grass into milk that they produce to feed their young, but that we can then squeeze from their udders.

And the milk of different species of ruminants is really, really different.

People don't realize that ruminants include deer and camel and reindeer and horses.

Elaine says that actually horses are half ruminant.

They're not quite as good at turning grass into fat, but people have made butter with their milk, but there's also...

Goat and sheep and yak and water buffalo and of course cows.

And cows were one of the last to be domesticated, so the very early butters were no doubt sheep or goat.

And sheep's milk, that has twice the fat content of cow's milk.

Goat milk has no carotene, so its butter is always white.

Yak has more protein.

Camel's milk can have up to three times the vitamin C.

And obviously, these differences in the milk, they affect how the butter tastes.

There's a great producer in California, Haverton Hill.

They make a really nice sheep butter and it does taste sheepy.

I'll warn people, you know, it's definitely not like a cow's butter.

It's quite different.

I happen to like it.

Some people don't.

So the ruminants that we use for milk, these are animals that have been domesticated all over the world.

Reindeer are domesticated in Finland and Russia, water, buffalo, and India, for example.

But there are also some reminiscents that never were domesticated, such as bison or elk.

These are native North American ruminants that do make milk, but they were hunted rather than farmed.

So that seems like an opportunity, right?

Could you make bison butter?

Is that even possible?

I have not tried it.

I'm pretty certain it's possible.

I think most bison are not bred for milking in this country, but certainly they are lactating and you could collect the milk and presumably make the cream.

That's a great question.

I think that would be interesting to try.

That might be something we could look forward to.

Yeah, maybe if this podcasting thing doesn't work out,

I'll move into a moose bison elk milk.

How do you have a

business elk butter?

Doesn't that sound great?

Elaine told us that the first butters were probably from sheep and goats because those were the first ruminants domesticated in the Fertile Crescent.

It would have tasted a lot different than the butter we're used to, but nobody knows exactly when that happened.

When did people start making butter?

Well, we can't know precisely when, but we're pretty certain that it follows the domestication of animals, and that would have been at least 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent area, potentially even much earlier if you look at Mongolia and the Tibetan Plateau, where they were domesticating yaks, I think 15,000 years ago.

So it's a very ancient product.

Food historians think it didn't just happen in one place and spread, so to speak, but rather butter making arose in many different places.

Most likely it was an accident, a process of collecting milk in an animal sack that would have been the earliest container for milk, and carrying that sack of milk, whether it was on someone's back or on the back of an animal, carrying it across a valley or a hill.

For at least half an hour, it had to be transported with this rocking motion that would have led to butter suddenly forming because rocking that sack back and forth is a form of agitation.

In fact, Elaine says the butter is still made that way in a handful of tiny remote villages in the Middle East and North Africa.

They put the cream in animal skins, hang it from a tree, and rock it back and forth.

There are also remnants of another ancient form of churning butter.

4,000-year-old terracotta jugs from Sumeria held the milk, and the buttermakers used a plunger to churn the liquid up and down until butter was formed.

This is also still used around the world.

Elaine visited Bhutan to see yak butter being made in just this way.

And that we had to hike up to about 13,000 feet to meet with the herders who live on these high mountaintops.

They're the yak herders who live in a very timeless way.

It really was like stepping back in time, thousands of years, because really nothing has changed in their lifestyle except perhaps their clothing.

They wear a fleece now.

But essentially they're living the same way their ancestors have lived for many thousands of years.

So Chun Yi, that's the Bhutanese lady's name, she milks the yak and she aims to collect about six gallons of raw milk.

She basically took the milk, put it in a stream to cool it.

It was in a plastic pail, cooled it down because you need to get milk or cream to a certain temperature to make butter.

and then you know dragged that into the house and put the whole milk in her churn.

She used a traditional churn.

It's called a plunger churn, just like the one used in ancient Sumeria.

It's the kind of churn you picture from kids' storybooks.

You know, it just has a pole that you push up and down.

It has a cross piece on the bottom and you push it up and down inside this wooden bucket.

They've been used around the world.

There's like one of the most common and primitive forms of

buttermaking tools.

And then pumped up and down for, you know, a good 30 minutes.

I helped her quite a bit.

After 30, 40 minutes of churning, little kernels of butter started to separate out.

It was so beautiful in a way.

You know, such an efficient, almost like dance she did with taking the butter pieces out of the buttermilk and slowly forming them into this beautiful almost triangle, which she patted and turned and squeezed and just getting the moisture out of it.

It was really a lovely thing to watch.

So this fresh yak butter, it's not destined for toast or for pie crust or whatever.

It's going to be whisked into black tea to turn it into butter tea.

Which is a thing I have drunk a lot of because my best friend from high school is Tibetan.

But it's not a thing I've ever learned to love.

But I can't imagine why they drink so much of it.

Butter has a lot of fat and protein and calories.

It's great to fill you up, and I can totally see how it would be a fantastic food for a physically challenging nomadic lifestyle in the freezing Himalayas.

It'd warm you right up.

Butter is, for sure, a really big deal in the Himalayan region.

It's in your tea, but it's also in all the temples.

That was one of the most surprising chapters to research: the one about the kind of metaphysical life life of butter.

And the Tibetans have a long history of using butter as a sacred tool.

Before Buddhism came to Tibet, butter was part of religious ceremonies there.

They'd make a clay out of butter and flour and use it to tell fortunes.

And then when Buddhism arrived, Tibetans started creating beautiful, transient religious sculptures called turmas that represent different deities.

And they take the butter to create these turmas, they color it, they carve it, they mold it.

These are really exquisite carvings that are essential for Buddhist practice.

And you can still see that being done today.

There is something a little magical about butter, that just by churning cream, you can get this rich, solid bar of golden goodness.

So perhaps it's not surprising that wherever butter was made, it was incorporated into religious practices.

Well, in the Vedic Aryans, were the early peoples who preceded the Hindus in India.

And what I discovered there was that they worshipped a fire god named Agni and their ritual was to create a big fire and to sprinkle butter, typically it would have been ghee, but it's a butter oil, on the flames and that causes them to crackle and dance and leap.

And all the while they'd be reciting verses praising their god, but also praising butter.

In the Bible, the very, very first meal mentioned, Abraham cooks for three angels.

And one of the things he includes in his offering is butter.

Some of the oldest surviving butter in the world is from Ireland.

And it turns out that might have something to do with belief systems, too.

You might have heard of bog butter being dug up by archaeologists.

Yeah, bog butter is butter that is packed into a usually a wooden little barrel or sometimes wrapped in muslin or grass.

And this would have been done for many thousands of years in places like ancient Ireland, but also in Norway and parts of Scotland.

So a peat bog is an excellent environment for preserving things.

It's anaerobic and things just don't break down.

You know there's some belief that they put the butters there to preserve them but now they've begun mapping out where all of these samples have been found in Ireland and they see that they're on these kind of sacred boundaries between ancient tribes.

So now the feeling is among many historians that these butters were offerings to the elementals, to the fairies.

I think it makes sense because butter was so valuable, why would they have left it there?

Even if they were putting it there to preserve it, why would it be left?

So I think it's a good theory that it was food for the fairies.

There were lots of superstitions around witches and stealing people's butter, and butter pops up in surprising ways in language too.

Top of the morning to you.

You may have heard that Irish version of hello.

Elaine says it comes from top of the milk, where you'd get cream for butter.

But not everyone in the ancient world was into butter.

The Romans were not fans of butter.

They had their oil.

And they had their enemies, the northern tribes of Europe, the butter-loving Celts, the Visigoths, and all the rest.

And the northern people, you know, who they had much conflict with, ate a great amount of butter, not only ate the butter, but they used it as a hair treatment to sort of clean their hair and keep their hair down.

So they smelled like butter, they ate butter.

And this is how they really got that nickname.

They were called Butter Barbarians.

I kind of like it.

It's a great band name.

There's even a guy today calling himself the Butter Viking, and he's trying to use science to make the most delicious butter ever.

A noble calling.

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We realize that while we've been digging into the mysteries of butter flavor and the mystical nature of butter worship, we have not actually figured out the semi-miraculous process by which milk is turned into butter.

The thing we have mentioned a couple of times is the most important step.

The cream or the milk has to be shaken around a lot.

This agitation breaks apart the membrane around the fat molecules and then those bits of fat clump together away from the water.

And that, by the way, is the reason why butter is yellow even though milk is white.

Remember that beta-carotene in the grass that we told you about?

So the beta-carotene is inside every fat molecule in the milk that's floating around and these little fat molecules float around because they have this membrane that keeps them suspended.

But once you break that membrane, you can then see the beta-carotene.

You essentially have exposed the beta-carotene in the fat molecule.

In other words, you've turned the cream inside out.

But we actually need to back up a bit because there are a few steps that buttermakers have traditionally taken before breaking up all those bits of fat.

First, after milking the animal, they would let the milk sit out for a day or longer.

This served two purposes.

The cream would start to rise to the top, and the milk and cream would start to ferment a little.

And that is thanks to, yes you guessed it, microbes.

So it was very easy for lactic bacteria, which are naturally present in milk and many, many things, to ferment the milk, much like you would be making yogurt.

So the cream was naturally cultured.

That's what culturing is, when you have lactic bacteria present and they ripen and add a degree of acidity and tanginess.

And actually the more fermented, more aged cream generally yielded more butter as well as that lovely, tangy, cultured taste.

But you didn't want to let it ferment too long, or it'd start to taste more like cheese.

So you have your fermented, cultured cream.

But then you have to make that cream cold so the fat could start to congeal.

Which is why Chen Yi, the Bhutanese yak herder, had to put the milk in a stream.

Because you can't make butter if the temperature is above 70 degrees or 21 degrees Celsius.

All of this butter making, it can be done with the milk.

with milk too, but that takes longer than churning just the cream.

There were actually a bunch of different inventions to try to automate the process.

Putting a dog on a treadmill to power a churn was a popular solution.

Popular?

Maybe not with a dog.

So this process would take about 20 to 30 minutes, and the sound changed.

That's how people judged how far along the butter was.

They didn't have timers.

It would start sloshy, and then it would become much softer and more muffled just before the fat began to clump.

And then when it was ready, it became louder again, almost like beating a drum.

Then the women, and yes, it was almost all women, they'd wash the clumps of butter to get rid of the last of the buttermilk, then they'd knead the clumps together to wring out some more liquid and to smooth out the butter's texture, and then they salted it.

Butters were heavily salted, probably about three times as salty as they are today, to the point where they were would also be pickled in salt water, you know, suspended in a very strong salt solution.

This was so that earlier generations could have butter all year round.

Obviously, as we've talked about before, salt is a preservative.

And depending on how long the butter was going to be kept, it could be salted to the the point where it was inedible, like salt cod.

And then to use them, you had to soak them in clean water.

That tradition of salting butter is why we eat salted butter still today, though not nearly that salty.

Me, I just like it.

It's tasty.

So that's how butter was made in the past.

And Cynthia mentioned something earlier about who was making it.

Basically, it was nearly always women.

Well, I found universally that there was a strong taboo against men handling milk because it was so much associated with the female rights of birth and lactation and fertility.

This sounds like just another chore that women have to do, right?

Like all the housework and all the cooking and now they also have to churn cream for 30 minutes at a time.

But this chore had a particular advantage for women because it allowed them to engage in a certain degree of marketing and branding and allowed them to leave their farmstead.

So that was unique for women who were usually very much tied to the household and to the farm.

But when they were selling their butter, they could go to town, you know, they could sort of see other people and get the news and also, you know, exercise some entrepreneurship.

Each household might have had its own specially carved mold for the butter.

It was a way the butter seller, the woman, could highlight her product.

Other things that women did were to grow special soft lettuce leaves to wrap their butter and then wrap it in fresh herbs.

Sometimes they layered the butter with flower petals to infuse it.

So there was this business around butter that was unique because it brought them out into the world into a little bit of competition.

And that was unlike many of the other chores that they had.

That connection between butter and female empowerment stretched across all levels of society.

And I mean all.

Yes, well Marie Antoinette created what was called a pleasure dairy on her estate in Versailles.

And this dairy was quite elaborate on the inside.

It had marble carvings and gold fittings.

The milk pails are porcelain.

It was really, really quite beautiful.

When I visited Versailles, I thought this pleasure dairy was just another example of the sort of frivolous spending that ends up getting you guillotined.

It kind of was.

And what also struck me was this incredible romanticizing of peasant women's lives on the farm.

But Elaine argues it was more than that.

This was essentially a woman controlling her domain.

She knew that as a woman, the dairy could be her domain.

She supposedly made some butter, made some cheese.

We don't really know for sure, but it became actually then a very popular thing among aristocratic women to build a pleasure dairy into their garden area.

But all this female entrepreneurship and the way the dairy maids essentially were the boss of at least this particular area of food production, that all changed in the late 1800s when Swedish engineer Gustav de Laval invented the centrifugal cream separator.

It revolutionized the dairy world completely because for the first time you didn't have to wait now for cream to rise.

You could take the milk and put it through this centrifuge which basically operates on the principle that things have different densities.

So it would separate out things that are lighter like the fat from things that are heavier like water.

It did radically speed things up.

The centrifugal cream separator could separate out 300 pounds of milk per hour.

You didn't have to wait days for the cream to rise to the top.

But that acceleration also changed the flavor of butter quite dramatically because the lactic acid bacteria no longer had time to get jiggy.

Well it made it suddenly much sweeter.

If you notice on some butter packages it will still say sweet cream butter and that was a big deal in the early 1900s when they were promoting sweet butter.

It was no longer the tangy culture product that it had always been.

And so to make this machine efficient and effective, farmers had to pull their milk.

They weren't making butter on the farm anymore.

They brought fresh milk to the centrifuge.

And the rise of these centralized creameries, that changed women's place in butter making.

Yeah, radically.

It really did because again,

women were now not leaving the farm to go sell their butter.

Basically, their husbands would load the milk onto wagons and bring it to the creamery, and that was that.

So it really eliminated all that entrepreneurship.

No more dairy maids, but at this point, butter is still king.

It doesn't have any major competitor until margarine.

Stick margarine tastes better.

Soft margarine spreads easier.

Hold it.

Here's a margarine for both.

Margarine was

again in the late 1800s.

That was a really radical time period between the cream separator and refrigeration coming in and then margarine, you know, this big competitor for butter.

Like many food inventions, both good and bad, we have the military to thank for this one.

Specifically, Napoleon III, commander of the French.

His uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, held the competition that resulted in the invention of canning, as you will know if you listen to Outside the Box, our episode on packaging.

And a few decades later, his nephew was planning to invade Prussia, all these invasions.

And Napoleon III wanted to find something to feed his soldiers that was cheaper than butter and traveled better.

So he also held a contest with a grand prize for anyone who could invent an alternative to butter.

A chemist came up with a winning formula.

A formula that contained beef fat, milk, and salt.

The chemist, Juan Hippolyte Meje Mouri, called his product oleomargarine.

Oleo means oil, and margaric acid was the main fatty acid in his mixture.

I have to admit, this combo of rendered beef fat, milk, and salt, it does not sound remotely appealing to me, but it caught on in the U.S.

Because there was a lot of bad butter in the market, particularly in the States.

There's a lot of rancid butter, dirty butter, moldy butter, and that was basically sold to people of very little means.

Poor people usually had very poor butter.

And then margarine came along, which at the time was quite a natural product, and it tasted better than rancid butter.

So it became really a popular alternative to butter.

And this was the start of an epic battle, one that has dragged on for more than a century at this point between the dairy industry and its deadly rival.

The buttermakers, they were none too pleased with this new rival, upstart margarine.

And they used all kinds of taxation, legislation, regulation, and some of the really crazy things I discovered was certain states required that the margarine be dyed pink or black.

Obviously to make it very unappealing, but also to kind of stigmatize it as a bad product.

They even criminalized margarine in certain states where it was just criminal to make margarine.

That law was passed in New York, my current abode.

In fact, the law banned making any article designed to take the place of butter.

It was struck down as unconstitutional after just six weeks, but still.

I'm still stuck on this image of dyed pink and black margarine.

I'm having a hard time picturing what it would look like on toast.

But the color thing, that was margarine's Achilles heel.

Naturally, it was a sort of whitish-gray color, and most margarine manufacturers then dyed it a more appealing yellow shade.

So the butter makers lobbied for and got the Federal Margarine Act.

It was passed in 1886, and it said that any yellow margarines were now subject to tax.

But the margarine makers got around this act with a little loophole they figured out by putting a special little something extra in.

It was like a DIY thing.

So people bought their margarine.

That was in a plastic pouch with a little tablet of food coloring, and they had to knead that coloring into the margarine at home.

And it was like a nuisance for the average homemaker.

And it was completely because of legislation that was trying to make it a nuisance, trying to discourage people from buying margarine.

But all of this legal shenanigans was not enough to save butter for margarine's inexorable rise.

And that rise was given a huge boost in the 1950s by a guy named Ansel Keys.

He was the anti-fat crusader.

He was a physiologist, a scientist who was studying nutrition in the 1950s.

He was convinced that fat in the diet was causing the spike in heart disease in the United States.

He made a big pronouncement to the World Health Organization that it was the clearest relationship.

Fat calories in the diet was totally connected to death from heart disease.

To him, there was no room for argument.

And he had some critics.

Not everyone believed him, but the politicians did believe him for the most part, I think, because it seemed very intuitively correct that if you have fat in your arteries, it must be coming from the fat in your diet.

Today, his theory has received a lot of criticism.

Ansel Keys cherry-picked his data to match his theory.

He surveyed diets in post-war Europe, where people's diets bore hardly any relationship to what they would have eaten before all the devastation and rationing.

And we've since learned that the science doesn't necessarily add up.

However, logical it seems that butter on your plate would turn to fat on your artery walls, it's actually not that simple.

Even at the time, there were scientists who knew that his research methods were actually pretty shoddy.

Also, it's important to note that by the 50s, margarine was not made with beef fat anymore.

It was made with what are called trans fats.

These are the hydrogenated vegetable oils.

They have hydrogen added to make them solid.

But scientists, even in the 50s and 60s, knew that trans fats were probably bad for us, and it turns out they are.

But Anselkeys gained a lot of traction because his anti-fat campaign made so much sense to people.

So by the 1970s, it had pretty much become diet policy in the U.S.

to eliminate as much fat as possible in diet.

So we ended up with a very carbohydrate-rich diet that we have today.

Which again, even at the time, some scientists said was not a good idea.

Basically, people replace butter and cheese and other dairy whole foods with low-fat, high-sugar-processed foods.

And today, an increasing number of researchers are blaming that shift for the huge rise in obesity in the U.S.

in the 80s and 90s.

By the 70s, Ansel himself had slightly shifted his position.

He came to think that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, these weren't so bad.

He still thought saturated fats, butter, and actually coconut oil is another one.

He thought these saturated fats were still evil.

But there have been large studies in the past few years that call this into question.

It doesn't seem like saturated fats and butter consumption have any connection to heart disease.

But this is still subject to debate, and there's a lot of nuance.

If you're removing butter, what are you replacing it with?

What's the overall balance of fatty acids in your diet?

Scientists do still argue about whether or not to worry about saturated fats like butter, but butter is definitely starting to look better.

Butter has always looked just fine to me.

But in the meantime, thanks in large part to Ansel Keys, a whole generation of Americans thinks that butter is the devil.

They heard everyone from their doctor to Fabio telling them that margarine was better.

And you know, when it's Fabio, you don't argue with that.

She wanted to remember the love they shared for butter, but cholesterol took away their passion until.

I can't believe it's not butter.

I can't believe it's not butter.

The taste you love without the cholesterol.

You're gonna trust Fabio.

But seriously, this is sad.

We know now that butter is certainly a better choice than margarine is, and it's also delicious.

I love butter.

Luckily, there are now more and more people who are discovering butter's good side.

For one thing butter has never gone out of fashion with chefs because it's just too useful in too many different dishes.

How we use it is related to its temperature.

If it's soft we you know beat it into frostings we make cakes and cookies and things like that.

If it's hard we can layer it to make pastries, puff pastry, croissants.

If we melt it, it's used in sauces.

So it really has so much to do with its relationship to temperature.

I don't know that there's any other food that has that kind of versatility.

Butter doesn't just add its own rich flavor, it enhances the taste of other ingredients by giving them a creamy base to coat the mouth.

It also affects texture in a way that other fats in cooking can't.

When you blend butter and sugar together for a cake, you get tiny air bubbles in the butter, and that gives cakes a tender, springy texture.

As Elaine says, and she has lots of delicious recipes as examples in her book, butter can tenderize, emulsify, leaven, crisp, crumble, caramelize, and enrich.

It's like the Swiss Army knife of the kitchen.

That's in the kitchen, but if you want to taste butter yourself, you have so many more options today.

Dairy farmers are getting back into making artisanal butter because a lot of us want to try it.

And really taste all the variety of flavors butter can have.

Like we said at the start, butter doesn't just taste like butter.

It all depends on what the cows are eating, their breed, how the butter is made.

There's a huge flavor range that's possible that we're only just beginning to rediscover and explore.

So of course, we asked Elaine what all of you should do if you want to explore for yourself.

She had some tips.

They should go on a butter hunt

within their area and I would encourage them to go to farmers markets, specialty cheese shops often have some interesting butters and also the supermarket and to get at least four different kinds.

I would certainly recommend they get a standard supermarket butter and then put that next to an artisanal butter and a cultured butter.

And then, ideally, if they could get a goat butter or a sheep butter, that would be really interesting.

Yep, cultured butter.

We stopped eating that here in the US until recently, though you could find European cultured butter in high-end stores.

But today, you can get cultured butter made here, and it has a far richer, more complex flavor than the more common sweet cream butter.

There's one more butter Elaine recommended that I hadn't even heard of: whey butter.

Essentially, what they take is the whey over from cheddar cheesemaking and that has a small percentage of fat left in it but it's been through a culturing process during the cheesemaking so it does have a slight nuance a little nuttiness sometimes I've had whey butters that have I think of umami I think of that sort of mouth-filling flavor.

Seems like you probably have to be in Wisconsin to find this one.

So we decided to do a live show in Madison in June so that we could taste some.

Details in just a minute.

I tend to buy my butter these days at the farmer's market.

I love the taste of cultured butter, but my partner Tim and I do still buy regular sweet cream supermarket butter, especially for baking.

Butter doesn't have to be fancy to be good.

We should be so grateful for how beautiful our supermarket butters are.

They're so standardized.

You know, our cookies always come out the same way and they're spreadable.

Yeah, they do a good job and it's a pure thing.

You know, it's a pure product still.

The cream goes in, the butter comes out.

Thanks to Elaine Kosrova, author of Butter, a Rich History, for joining us this episode.

We have links to the book at our website.

And thanks to our wonderful volunteer, Ari Lebowitz, for suggesting the topic.

As always, if you're looking for ways to support the show but you aren't flush with cash, why not leave us a nice review on iTunes or suggest us to a friend?

We're trying to grow.

And we'll be back in two weeks with an episode that tackles the thorny topic of southern food, from its origins in slaveholding times to its current gentrification.

And my guess is Paula Dean isn't isn't gonna like what our guests have to say.

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