Build me up, butter
I am not very good at luxury. I have a go but I wear it badly, like a scratchy ballgown from TK Maxx.
Lovely things, I immediately ruin. There are coffee stains on my fanciest coat and a moth hole in my only cashmere scarf. In fact, There’s A Moth Hole in My Cashmere Scarf would be the title of my one-woman Alan Bennett play. I am terrible at being waited on. I get flustered when restaurant hosts take my coat, in case tissues fall out of the sleeves.
I frequently turn up to dinner parties clutching the wine with the prettiest label and yell “I’M SORRY I DON’T KNOW WINE OK” before a sip makes it halfway down anyone’s oesophagus. About once a year I douse myself in Chanel №5 at a perfume counter, impatient to understand its charms, but every year I just smell loo cleaner. I love the idea of spa breaks but inevitably end up bored, pink-faced and faintly nauseated by all the white towelling slippers.
Food, however, I can luxuriate in. I never feel richer than I do with a bellyful of something gout-inducing, making me all glossy from the inside out. And nothing, but nothing, does that better than butter.
I didn’t really eat butter until I was at university. Like so many 90s kids, I was raised exclusively on margarine and Dairylea triangles. I know, I know, it’s like reading a lower middle class misery memoir — but swallow your tears, because the story has a happy ending. Eventually posher, free-range friends from the countryside introduced me to the hard stuff (Clover was a gateway drug) and I realised what I had been missing all those years. Butter: the true taste of luxury.
Some would say the true taste of luxury can’t be something you can buy for a quid in Tesco. It must be oysters, or Wagyu beef, or something else that tastes of iron and earth and sinew. Or the ‘luxury pie!’ Bernard makes in Black Books, with truffles, saffron, caviar and bits of oven. Daisy would, famously, vote for lobster — and I almost agree, except that I am lazy to my bones and feel true luxury lies in food that requires very little effort on the eater’s part. No pliers.
So what’s the softest ingredient? The easygoing good-time gal of the dinner table? And what’s that lobster swimming in anyway? That’s right! It’s our pal, butter.
Once you realise about butter, you notice it everywhere. The day I explained to my luxury-averse boyfriend (who prefers his toast dry, like twigs) that the main reason food tastes better in restaurants isn’t magic or expertise but liberal application of butter, cream, oil or all of the above, I think I opened his eyes but crushed his soul. The day he watched the Bake Off contestants folding vast sheets of butter into their pastry dough with both hands and realised just why croissants turn the paper bag see-through, it was like Dorothy peeping behind the wizard’s curtain. He’d eaten from the tree of knowledge and found it smeared with Kerrygold.
I, meanwhile, am making up for lost time. I don’t spread, I slather. In scrambled eggs and mash, obviously, but also in porridge and spaghetti and pear crumble. Sometimes, on very hard days, I slice it cold as though it were cheese.
And although I’m late to the party, it’s really only just getting going again after a long lull — we’re in the midst of a butter revival. Sales are up, and flavoured butters are drawing a crowd at some of London’s best tables, like Oklava, where Selin Kiazim’s medjool date butter is so addictive they started selling jars of it in Selfridges (Leon’s cinnamon date butter toast is almost as dreamy and available in train stations, you’re welcome). Or The Dairy, which serves smoked bone marrow butter with its sourdough. Or Bao, where your sweetcorn comes in a casual puddle of beef butter.
And thanks to bulletproof coffee, the health food trend no satirist could have made up for lols, butter has even left its greasy paw print on the cult of clean eating. “Fat is totally fine again!” cry the headlines — and we’re happy to ignore the dietary small print (*stop slicing it like cheese, Lauren) because it doesn’t get better than butter.
In those butter-free years (which, now I think of it, culminated in me being cast as Margery in an A level Drama production of Vinegar Tom, cursed to churn milk fruitlessly forever while her husband’s knob falls off), one of my favourite after school snacks was ‘butter balls’ — a patch of malleable white Hovis with a blob of Flora in the middle, rolled until perfectly spherical and eaten in front of Nickleodeon with all the panache of the guests at the Ambassador’s reception.
And now I wonder, would little Lauren have grown up better at luxury if she’d had real butter in there? Would she now enjoy massages, instead of lying tense and awkward for an hour out of fear she will fart or fall asleep? Would she understand the purpose of fabric conditioner, or have a preferred brand of champagne?
Probs not, and she’d almost certainly appreciate it less now. But she might have fewer grease smears on her posh pyjamas.
This essay was originally published in the email newsletter Schmancy!, by Lauren Bravo and Daisy Buchanan. Sign up here.
