From Greg Atkinson

At the great round table where I took most of my meals as a child, real butter seldom appeared. Ubiquitous whipped margarine was spread on toast, stirred into cake batters, and melted over corn on the cob; but real butter in pale cold sticks was stored discreetly in the refrigerator and, like the good china was brought out only on special occasions.

The special occasions that called for good china were basically public events - dinner parties and holidays - but the times for real butter were private times. On quiet mornings when she was alone in the house or when her mother was visiting, my mother would bring out the butter and melt it over toast, savoring it along with her rare moments of peace and quiet.

“You wouldn’t like this,” she told us kids, and for a while, we believed her.

“Your grandfather,” she told us, spreading a little of the forbidden yellow fat along a piece of crust, “Wouldn’t allow margarine in the house. But when real butter was rationed during the war, your grandma had to buy margarine and she hid it from him. It came in white blocks with a little packet of yellow dye that had to be stirred in.”

I imagined my grandmother surreptitiously preparing the spread and hiding the evidence. Coming from a dairy family herself, it must have been very strange for her. Perhaps, I thought, she felt it her patriotic duty to perform that clandestine kitchen ritual.

The stuff my grandmother used as a butter replacement was an early form of what would later become a staple in American homes. Originally, laws promoted by lobbyists for the dairy industry prohibited the addition of coloring to non-dairy spreads so that only the real thing would have the appealing and distinctive yellow color of butter. But eventually those laws were overturned and yellow spreads proliferated.

“Your grandfather never noticed.”

This part I couldn’t believe. I had tasted on the sly the forbidden butter and knew its wild and distinctive flavor was completely unlike margarine, so bland and familiar that it had no taste at all. Anyone would notice the difference between butter and margarine I thought, as surely as they would notice the difference between a Beatles song performed by the original artists and a facsimile orchestrated for background noise, anyone, and especially the legendary gastronome who was my grandfather. Perhaps my grandfather did notice the switch and chose to keep quiet. Who was fooling whom?

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no fooling anyone when it comes to cooking and baking with butter. Butter handles differently than margarine. On the stove, it can be stirred into sauces to create smooth emulsions that melt like fine chocolate in the mouth. It can be clarified into a versatile fat that takes on a nutty glow and withstands high temperatures for quick frying. In the oven, it forms delicate flaky layers in pastry and shortens cakes with incomparable smoothness.

Not long ago, I wrote about American ambivalence toward fat in article for Pacific Northwest, the Sunday newsmagazine of The Seattle Times. The story, under the headline “Beyond Fat Phobia,” describes a little of the history of hydrogenated oils and the dangerous trans fats found in them and the story concludes with a recipe for homemade chocolate sandwich cookies made with butter. Some readers wrote back, concerned that I was ignoring the health hazard that some people face when eating any form of saturated fat.

Since my story was written for a “Taste” column it had to adhere strictly to parameters of space and content defined by that column, so I could not address in any real detail the abundant research about dietary fats that is one of the hottest areas in nutritional science right now. In fact, it’s well nigh impossible for any lay person to be fully versed in all the myriad and often apparently conflicting information regarding dietary fats. But it is certainly not news that saturated fats are linked to high cholesterol, to elevated levels of LDL, and reduced levels of HDL; links between saturated fat and these significant human health concerns were well established decades ago. What is news is that much of the research that led to this understanding may have been flawed, because no distinction was made between naturally occurring saturated fats like butter and lard, and chemically altered oils in the form of hydrogenated shortening.

The latest research shows that certain saturated fats (shorthand for fats that are solid at room temperature), may in fact be among the healthiest oils of all in terms of maintaining a positive ratio of HDL to LDL, and lowering overall serum cholesterol. Coconut oil for example has been proven in several studies to produce these very effects. A lot of the advice that came out during the last quarter of the twentieth century regarding saturated fat was based on research that did not distinguish between natural tropical oils, animal fat and chemically hydrogenated oils.

What’s more, current studies have revealed that the diets of farm animals greatly impact the quality of animal fat and its impact on human systems. Grass-fed dairy cows for instance produce butterfat with remarkably high concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids, and organic butter made with cream from grass-fed cows will have a completely different impact on a person’s health than “conventionally” produced butter from grain-fed cows. The same appears to be true with eggs from free-range chickens versus eggs from battery caged birds, and with lard from sustainably raised pigs with access to the outdoors. I find all this very encouraging.

Gastronomically speaking, saturated fats like butter, lard and coconut oil are essential for achieving certain textures in baked goods. While a perfectly delightful muffin or sponge cake can be made with polyunsaturated oil, like canola or corn oil, pastry for pie crusts and shortbread demand a different sort of fat. That’s why I consider the research that isolates hydrogenated oils and demonstrates that other hard fats are less harmful to be significant from a culinary perspective.

About 80 percent fat and 20 percent water and milk solids, dairy butter is unique among kitchen fats and oils. Its flavor aside, it is inimitable in other ways. Softer margarines with less saturated fat often contain more water and are less suitable for frying; and while they make decent cakes, they are not well suited for piecrusts and other pastries. Shortening and lard, with no water at all, are better butter substitutes for these purposes; but of course they lack the delicate taste of butter.

Personally, I would rather have a sliver of something made with butter than a great pile of something else made with margarine or so-called vegetable shortening. I think the substitutes leave us hungry no matter how much we eat because they do not satisfy our innate sense of goodness. Imitations of any kind do not fill our very real need for something good and true.

I think we should allow ourselves occasionally, even regularly to splurge in small ways so that our needs may be met. There is no need to feel perpetually denied, trying in vain to fill a sensory void with gobs of margarine when a small pat of real butter would do so much more. And if the butter is organic, and preferably made with cream from grass fed cows, then the fat might well be every bit as healthy as the coveted fat found in wild salmon or flax seeds. Of course no one should eat too much fat of any kind, but everyone needs to eat some fat, and we might as well eat fat that tastes good.

Whole Wheat Shortbread Cookies
The coarse texture of “Sugar in the Raw,” a brand of unrefined turbinado sugar, gives these cookies more crunch than your average shortbread, and whole wheat flour gives them depth of flavor. Since the ingredients are so simple, it is important to use the best butter you can find and very fresh whole wheat flour. (Some stores allow you to grind whole wheat berries to order.) Reminiscent of English “digestive” wafers, these are ideal as part of an after dinner cookie platter with chocolate truffles and a few fresh berries or grapes.

(Makes 2 dozen cookies)

2 cups organic whole wheat flour, preferably freshly ground
1/2 cup “Sugar in the Raw” or other turbinado sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup good quality unsalted organic butter

1.) In a food processor or a mixing bowl, process or whisk the flour with the sugar and salt to combine. Cut in the butter until the mixture is uniformly crumbly and just beginning to clump together to form dough. Divide the dough in half and shape each piece into a log 8 inches long. Chill the logs in the refrigerator until firm, about half an hour.

2.) Preheat oven to 350 and line a baking sheet with a silicone pan liner or baker’s parchment. Cut each of the chilled logs of dough into 12 slices. Arrange the slices on a cookie sheet lined with baker’s parchment and bake until the cookies are darker around the edges and they smell like browned butter, about 18-20 minutes or. Cool the cookies to room temperature before wrapping.
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Greg Atkinson is author of West Coast Cooking and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Photo Credit: Organic Valley
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