Natural Feast
The dandelion is a promiscuous oracle. Tickling the tender underchin, held there by a teasing auntie, it never fails to affirm a passionate attachment. "Ooh, tee hee, little So-and-so loves butter!" If there were a similar folk litmus to test for sex, we'd probably find that little So-and-so has a taste for that, too. Some appetites are nearly universal. The true lover of butter is more accurately identified by the fine sheen on the chin than the little spot of reflected yellow light beneath it. A wrestler, a weight lifter, may cast an oily glow from pecs to abs, but the butter lover is characteristically soft of body--butter soft-- with the oleagenous zone limited to the area directly surrounding the mouth. Let there be no misunderstanding here. To the butter lover, this orifice, like its mirror image in female anatomy, is an organ of pleasure, a gateway through which the elixirs of ecstasy pass into the body. To its devotees, and I count myself among them, butter is not a foodstuff, not a condiment, not a culinary ornament so much as it is proof of the existence of god. Shredded wheat is capable of sustaining life. A low budget pregnancy diet of oranges, milk, and hard boiled eggs will carry both mother and unborn child through nine months of co-nutrition in reasonably hardy shape. Some people, even people of significant achievement and proven sophistication, are quite happy to subsist on the smelly gray mystery meats and fictional vegetables that make up the fast food menu. One can live without butter. On the other hand, if there were no such element on the planet, would anyone actually eat popped corn? Butter is the ultimate refinement of the most refined relationship that exists between human and ruminant, one of our few with fellow animals that is not terminal but sustained and mutually sustaining. No creature dies to provide us the delights of butter, slick on our lips, everso slightly salty on the tongue, the shade of its yellow remembering the exact nature of the grass or grain that built the milk, its richness a token of the exquisite surrender of the udder when that milk began to flow. Process, and the pinnacle of process, each step of the journey from grass to morning toast is implicit in the experience of butter in our mouths. Ninety eight point six, human body temperature, is the melting point, the thermodynamic moment when solid butter transforms to liquid gold, a substance alchemically absorbed into the body, no further grinding or fermentation necessary, no caloric bill of lading attached to the transaction. The bliss of butter, miraculously, is free. In its liquid state, butter is lubricant, greasing the skids and easing the chafe as we admit the world into ourselves. It seduces us into that act of incorporation. Another potato, another day. We profiteer from the metabolisms of every living organism, and butter is token and reward of our peaceful ascent up the food chain, our salty halo, the shining mantel of our condition. Butter is our room at the top, the oily halo on the throne of Scone. Sometimes I cannot stop myself from running the flat of my finger tip along the soft yellow brick, from sticking the finger in my mouth, where the harvested flower blossoms, as wild and subtle as a mountain meadow when all the snow is gone. When my husband makes pancakes, he melts the butter on the stove and brings it to the table in a little stainless steel pitcher carefully warmed in hot water. This is one of the ways he seduced my children, once he decided his seduction of their mother was likely to be a durable event. The three of them adore the instant union of butter and syrup atop the pancake. Personally, I find it a hasty sort of consummation, one that sidesteps the everso important foreplay, where the heat of the pancake is an irresistible strumpet, urging the butter to surrender its solid form, to go with the flow, participate in the evanescent menage a trois--pancake, syrup, butter--with all its tiny reverses and revelations, a tinge of salt subtle as a downy moustache, trailing a boa of lactose froth through the eddies of the golden stream. Of course, when it comes to waffles, I am deeply grateful to be married to a man who melts his butter. If less than infinite, the recombinant forms of butter are so many it would take at least until tomorrow afternoon simply to list them all. To show how much I value time, yours and my own--time which might more pleasurably be spent whipping fresh cream until it turns to butter, or mixing it with melted sugar till it ascends into caramel--I'll confine myself to the greater synergies. Butter and lemon. Butter and garlic. Butter and flour, with or without the sugar. The fish on our plates stand up and dance with the parsley under those lemon butter skies, humble egg yolks turn into continental aesthetes as soon as they shake hands with lemon juice and butter. They have a charming accent, says the whisk, and a sense of humor too. If garlic salt and butter slabbed on store bought French bread is a church basement potluck cliché, garlic butter, melted, welled saltily and brown in pearlescent shells or pretty little dishes, is a psalm, inducement and excuse for eating snails, clams, crabs, lobsters, mussels, and the fleshy gray green hearts of artichokes. Had butter and flour never met, the world would be a sadder place, our sauces possible but impoverished, our gravies fake, our cookies like those strangely pliable, semisolid ones you can buy at the store, the ones that smell more like a solvent than a sweet, the ones that never go stale, those flat cardboard-brown circles pimpled with skimpy motes of imitation chocolate, the ones whose packaging costs more than their consumable ingredients. Those cookies.You can bet there is no butter in them. We would never eat another croissant, another slice of pound cake, warmed in the oven before serving, so the edges crisp a little and yes, that dollop of supernumerary butter melts into the cake, sump in a yellow field, there would be no butter cream frosting, no respectable fudge, and Christmas would have to be canceled for lack of buttery ethnic baked goods--spritz, dolci, shortbread, and the powdered sugar factories would have to lay off half of their employees, and my husband would never reach across the table, smiling, to gently wipe the glisten from my chin. Someone who grew up in Minnesota once told me it was her girlhood job to knead the food coloring into the margarine when her mother brought it home from the store. The dairy lobby was so strong there they'd passed a law forbidding stores from selling it already yellow. That was her memory. Mine is of my uncle's dairy barn in the brown pre-dawn light, the air yeasty and dusty, a Strauss waltz playing on the Bakelite radio, while the cows chew their cud in time. A drowsy warmth rises from their bodies, and the milking machine sighs with peerless resignation. I do love butter.
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