Across the ancient world, alchemy was an arcane hybrid of science, philosophy and mysticism. Best known for their efforts to turn base metals into gold, its practitioners also sought to formulate an elixir of life. Around the same time, Bronze Age tribes of Ireland were making butter to store in peat bogs. This “bog butter” was a vital food, but also a currency.
Turning a rudimentary dairy product into a precious commodity, those early Celtic farmers succeeded where the great scholars of Greece and China failed. Today there remains something magical – alchemical – about the process and the end result. Neither has changed much, says Grainne Keena, a food technologist for 60-year-old Irish butter brand Kerrygold. “We still abide by first principles, which means sourcing milk from family farms where cows are raised on lush green grass, and that pasture-led diet results in a butter of natural golden colour and taste.” Speaking from an office that used to be a “museum room”, she holds up a traditional hand-operated paddle churn, like a glass bottle with wood blades.
The industrial churn they use now is much bigger, with stainless steel blades, “but the basic mechanism works exactly the same way”. Grainne grew up on a farm, and loved to bake with butter from an early age, but she knows well that many have a personal relationship with this product – the familiar taste evoking images of mothers, warm ovens and kitchen tables. “There’s a recognition that elevates the experience by bringing back moments of togetherness.”
Across the Irish Sea and English Channel, Camille Mancelle was raised in Normandy, on some of France’s very best dairy produce. “Camembert and crème fraîche were part of my education,” he says. But he didn’t fully appreciate the transcendent quality of local Isigny Sainte-Mère butter until he came to work for the company almost 20 years ago.
It stands out even from other French butters, by maturing cream for 18 hours before churning, while the “Nizo method” adds lactic starters at the beginning of the process (as opposed to the end). It’s more time-consuming, labour-intensive, and expensive to make than any competing brand, and subject to Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) restrictions that make each batch a “limited edition” as Camille puts it.
Demand far exceeds supply, “but we can’t make any more than we do”, he explains, “because those rules only allow for a certain number of cows per square metre of grass.”
Chefs often say that butter is the secret ingredient of everything, and they tend to want Isigny in particular because its flavour lingers through the cooking and eating.
“You get a lot of aromas and a kind of hazelnut taste. When you make a pastry with our butter, that taste is baked deep into the croissant, or pain au chocolat, and stays longer in your mouth.” But the source, or essence, is rooted in the terroir. Camille describes a ring of dairy cooperatives around the marshes of Bessin and Cotentin, which flood with fresh water in winter then drain to let the herd graze outdoors for a minimum of seven months.
Migrating birds come to roost and yellow wildflowers spring up, nourishing the cows with carotene and transmitting through their milk the colour and flavour of that landscape. It sounds like the world as it was at the dawn of agriculture. Perhaps that’s the real magic of butter: this life-giving substance discovered by the ancients and no less precious to us now, as it helps us remember our own beginnings.
