Butter A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova

Author:Elaine Khosrova [Khosrova, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616206505
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2016-11-09T23:00:00+00:00

NINE

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The Modern Buttersmith

SMALL BATCHES, BIG FANS

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The special thing about our butter is how its taste ages out, changing over time from the cultures added. If you taste it right out of the churn, it’s more sweet with a lot of bright lactic flavor. After a month, it has developed a secondary, slightly nutty, baked-bread kind of taste. After 120 days, the butter has a really interesting sharpness, but it’s not spoiled.

—ADELINE DRUART, production manager, Vermont Creamery, 2014

“JE SUIS ELANÉ … EYLANE KHOSROVAH,” I SUDDENLY heard myself saying in a confused French accent, having dialed through to a shop in Brittany. Frantically I was searching my memory for bits of high school French in an attempt to understand the fast-talking man at the other end of the phone. A man I’d been trying to track down for more than a month: Jean Yves Bordier, France’s most unorthodox butter dignitary. Despite the choppy phone dialogue, the call was a success. Eight days and about three thousand miles later, I found myself at the doorstep of his small shop at 9 rue de l’Orme in Saint-Malo.

Walking across the store’s Breton-blue threshold, a sensorial butter trip began. From a granite table in the middle of the rectangular boutique, a sharp drumming sound beat the air as a “butter patter” went to work. Customers clustered around the table to watch as the patter wielded a ribbed boxwood paddle in each hand to cleave a wedge of butter from a giant motte of fresh-made butter. He checked its perfect weight on a scale and proceeded to firmly thwack and smack at it with the paddles, rotating and shaping all sides of it at rapid-fire speed. In just seconds, a tight yellow palm-size brick of butter emerged. The patter passed it to an assistant who hand-wrapped the edible bullion in folds of white parchment paper.

A sweet lactic scent of butterfat—the unmistakable whiff of eau de dairy—lingered near the front of the shop where customers at the retail counter lined up to sample the house butter and flavored variations. The choices were many: delicately smoked butter tasting of cream and campfire; a vivid sweet pepper version the color of terra-cotta; a butter with sea salt crystals and another mixed with flecks of truffles; green-tinged butter embedded with local Brittany seaweed; and a putty-colored version made salty and chewy with olive puree. Sweet butters are also in the lineup, some mixed with honey, others with citrus. Next door, the shop’s adjoining cafe offered a butter-tasting course, with a sample tray of seven of these flavored butters.

La Maison du Beurre—the House of Butter—has been operating under various owners since 1927. But the bustling destination it is today—part dairy shrine, part market/cafe—didn’t exist until 1985 when the business was bought and reimagined by Bordier. Some in the trade claim that he’s more marketing genius than true artisan, but at a time when standardized, cheaper industrial butters have supplanted many smaller, traditional farmstead producers, Bordier has raised the appreciation for traditional beurre de baratte (butter from a batch churn) made slowly with natural lactic acid cultures.

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