What happened to good ‘old fashioned’
butter? You know, made from cream and a pinch of salt. There are a few tubs hidden
away at the very end of the fridge aisle, but you have to go past a whole
floral display of chemicals to find them. I’m talking about the scientific food
minefield: margarine. Why are people veering their trolleys away from butter? Michael
Pollan, a well acclaimed food journalist says, “Don’t eat anything your
Great-Grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” Would your grandma have grabbed
the margarine to make scones, to bake a cake or enrich gravy? I’m going to go
with a no.
What is wrong with butter? People have
been eating it for centuries, so why has it, in the last 40 years or so, been
met with such a wall of negativity? It’s more natural than any of the other
health-claim-wannabe’s on the shelf. And the taste? Margarine doesn’t stand
close in the slightest when compared to a thick creamy layer of golden butter
on a crusty piece of fresh bread, or the enriched taste it gives mushrooms when
they’re sautéed in a pan. For me to explain the brilliance of butter, I will
have to show you just how bad that margarine in your trolley is.
In a recent episode of Master chef,
contestants were asked to make butter. The Twitter verse went crazy over how
easy it was, saying things like “Wow, it’s that simple is it?” and “why doesn’t
anyone make their own butter anymore?” So why do customers go for fake food
items, when the real thing is sitting right next to it? Have we been bullied so
much about fat that we’re now afraid of it? Dairy products seem to have taken
the biggest blow, in terms of food products labeled as ‘Fat’ and ‘Bad’ for you.
Now we can choose from light cheese, ‘No fat Yoghurt’, ‘I can’t believe it’s
not butter’, skim milk, ‘plastic’ cheese, ‘Butter soft’ and the various types
of health-claim-cholesterol-dropping margarines. All these products use
nutrients as buzzwords like added potassium, vitamin d, antioxidants, omega 3’s
and proteins. Like full fat milk, butter is a taboo food item and is not welcome
in the everyman’s trolley. But when we compare the diets around the world, the
western diet is the worst in terms of health and sickness. We’re the ones with
the obesity, the cancer, and the diabetes. So maybe our nutritionists don’t have all the answers.
How the times have changed, the
legendary cook Julia Child once said “If you’re afraid of butter use cream”
wise words, but to the consumers of today she sounds crazy. Just after her
saying this, in the 1960’s, a new age of nutritionism took over and margarine
was allowed to be injected with the colouring Tartazine E102 to make it yellow
and appear like butter. Margarine then became the pop icon of
modern food and hit the shelves in dozens of brands. A cheap try-hard version
of creamy golden butter that told everyone it was healthier. How wrong it was.
Regardless it took over. Consumers bought into its “99% Fat free” claims and
“Added Omega 3” riffs. Who would have thought eating could get so sad and stoop
to this level of crappy, spreadable, un-tasteful oil, BORING! I am an advocate of butter. Working in
a French restaurant it seems to be the secret to making everything delicious.
Bring butter back.
In recent times science has made the
choices for consumers on what and whatnot to eat, but it just doesn’t seem to
be cutting it. Our culture used to tell us how to eat: ‘Don’t eat those berries
they’re poisonous’, ‘Don’t eat that meat, it’s gone rancid’. I say bring back
the old wives tales. It’s not like our health could get any worse! These
popular status-seeking foods, like margarine, need to be seen for what they
really are. Bad.
When I look at how ignored butter is
in today’s world it saddens me. The idea of margarine being in my restaurant is
almost unthinkable, I’ve never seen a chef use it, unless maybe to throw it at
an apprentice, margarine is just not welcome otherwise. Have you ever tried making a burn
noissette with margarine? What you get is cruddy black sediment that reeks of
something chemical, the nutty flavour you would get from butter is inexistent
and instead it tastes almost like you’ve thrown a stick of glue into the pan
instead. Why do we suddenly think we know better? Like margarine is the answer to
all our cooking anxieties? Butter is as old as history, even Jesus was into it
it’s that old, and it’s still made the same way it was centuries ago. A simple
churning of cream and you’ve got yourself a smooth spreadable condiment that
adds that needed moistness to a dry piece of bread, tastes sensational and that
is not anything like margarine. Which alternatively, only gives the moist
component to the bread and ultimately offers your toungue and tastebuds a tacky
mouthfeel and dull taste. But butter is still left out on the shopping list, ignored
in the supermarket aisles, and frowned upon at the checkout.
The process of making margarine is far
more complicated than butter’s simple over whipping of cream. It involves
hydrogenating clear unappetising fats or plant oils so that they become solid
and paste like, then a whole bunch of chemicals and colourings are added to
make it somewhat like butter. I spoke with an electrician who has worked at an Edible Oil Industries
(EOI) factory plant in Marrackville. He says, “There was allot of oils stored
in a huge tank that had a number of vats that all combined to create different
brands of margarine. If the temperature was lost on the lines feeding the
mixing vats it would be a gooey mess of solidifying fat with a very greasy
smell” Margarine is an imitation, and to me a total waste of time and money. It
is butter’s pure taste and high fat content that makes it the best for cooking
and baking, as it yields the best results in terms of tenderness and flakiness.
Imagine a cake made with margarine; it would probably taste like soap and not
have much bounce. Everything in moderation is the key, eating chemicals is not.
In Michael Pollan’s recent book ‘Food
Rules’, a smaller condensed ‘How to eat’ that follows on from his very
informative ‘In Defense of Food’, we
are given a gutsy eaters manual that takes this ‘back to basics’ approach to
eating. As Michael Pollan
reiterates, “If it came from a plant eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t”
A dairy farmer who sells his homemade
butter at the north Sydney markets (run on the first Saturday of each month)
spoke to me to talk about the secret of his sough- after organic butter. He
said, “I just keep whipping.” These small tubs of yellow golden butter are
local, fresh and free from nasty chemicals.. Food isn’t meant to be so
complicated; in fact the simpler it is, the better it is for you. It’s this kind of food we should aspire
to consume. We’re not only supporting farmers and producers, we’re also making
the healthier choice.
Interestingly butter wasn’t consumed
properly until the sixteenth century. The English delayed this by using it for
fuel in lamps (do they ever get food right?) Enter the French, who crafted the
foundations of butter and consumed it in truckloads. They made sauces like Hollandaise
and Béarnaise, made pastries like the Croissant and Danish, and enriched sweets
like caramel and short-crust pastry. Their cuisine of today has a lot to thank
for butter, the ‘Larousse Gastronomique’
would not be the same without it. Butter to the French is the essence of life,
where we say ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” The French say ‘You
can’t have the butter and the money from selling the butter.’ Without butter
the French would only have snails and frogs to sell.
But the French liked butter so much that
in the 1860’s emperor Napoleon III awarded a prize to anyone who could come up
with a cheaper substitute. Who would have thought it would be the experts of
butter, to create its ultimate nemesis. Invented by a chemist, margarine
entered the food scene along with its good friend industrialization and the two
have been happily married ever since. By the 1950’s butter had lost its appeal as consumers were
told to go for the cheaper and ‘healthier’ option in margarine. Marketers and
advertisers made it very hard for butter to get a reach out at the supermarket
so many companies swapped over to margarine manufacturing. Giving the people
what they wanted. This is where the
‘Butter vs Margarine’ debate gets laid on a little thick (pun intended.)
