buttered everything
Warning: This essay briefly discusses disordered eating.
My very first online order of the pandemic, once I’d come around to the fact that restaurants were going to be off-limits for a good while, was a butter dish.
I paid for expedited shipping. The thing couldn’t come fast enough. All of a sudden, I needed nothing more in my life than softened, room-temperature butter — butter as the cooking (eating, tasting) gods intended — multiple times a day. I needed it for morning toast and to melt in the pan when I made scrambled eggs. I needed it for the chunks of bread I’d tear off for afternoon snacks. A few times, I buttered a graham cracker.
Through it all, I never thought about the pace at which I was churning through sticks. I put salted butter out one week, and that was a revelation on a sweet croissant. Unsalted, I learned, was better with the massive slab of homemade focaccia I produced at some point last winter and on the popovers I watched billow and bubble in my oven before Christmas.
Now, I’m not sure what I’d do without that little white ceramic dish — or how I went so long without it. Until my early-pandemic revelation, butter dishes had always seemed to me as if they were the provenance of a bygone generation, not a 30-something who gets most of her recipes from Molly Baz, Claire Saffitz and NYT Cooking. Butter dishes were old fashioned, I figured, and borderline grimy.
I regret that blasphemy. And I really regret the years I spent feeling anything but enthusiastic about butter.
Growing up in the ’90s, I had no clue there were different types of butter — salted, unsalted, Irish, grass-fed, clarified, sweet cream — or that margarine was something distinctly other. I lived in a house where the fridge always featured a tub of Parkay. Eventually, we switched to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and let me be the millionth person to point out that’s a lie; its not-butter-ness is, in retrospect, quite believable. Back then, though, I didn’t have a clue. Even when she baked, my mom was equally likely to unwrap a foil-encased stick of margarine as she was to use butter. Whether that was behavior she learned from her own mother or just a sign of the times, I’m not sure. But for a kid who sure thought she was eating butter at a decent clip, I was living a life remarkably lacking in it.
And then, to confuse things further, at some point when I was in seventh grade, my brain went haywire. My body had recently shed its baby fat, and I suppose I liked my newfound angles enough to be terrified they’d disappear as quickly as they’d emerged. I reduced my consumption to food with clearly printed nutritional labels so I could take a full accounting of each day’s intake. I screamed at my parents and refused to admit anything was wrong. I talked to a therapist and a pediatrician, and then I started eating again.
To be clear: Things did go back to normal instantly — or that easily. But time has smoothed the roughest edges of those memories, and I can see now how I evolved. I realized I liked vegetables, fish and other nutrient-dense food. I learned to cook. I relaxed my grip. I exhaled.
And in the years between seventh grade and the dawn of this godforsaken coronavirus, I’d never have admitted I had any kind of negative feeling toward butter. I used it liberally when I baked and in recipes just as it was called for. But if there weren’t explicit instructions, I often subconsciously shied away. Toast, pancakes, biscuits — I mostly ate them butter-free, without a thought to what I was missing or why I’d decided it was worth missing in the first place. I guess it was the last vestige of those months when my half-formed brain did its best to destroy my body, when I was lucky it failed.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this when I bought that unobtrusive butter dish. I was so many years removed from restrictive eating that I rarely thought about any of my former bad habits — but after a few sticks went by the wayside that spring, I couldn’t help but recognize something had changed. Some final puzzle piece, one I had no idea was missing, had finally locked into place.
And at a time when very few things were capable of making anyone feel better, there was, at least, the simple novelty of butter to make everything taste better.