Butter Me Up!

My name is Evil Longoria and I am my deraon and Welcome to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores our past and present through food.

On every episode, we'll talk about the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages from our culture.

So make yourself at home.

Even drinking my Big Red, my last one in the fridge, I'm like freaking out. I'm like, wait a minute, it's my weekend luxury is one.

Big Red because I don't drink them often. And then I'm like, wait, how do I have one left? You need to get on that. I need to get on it.

Well, I will tell you what I did make yesterday, and.

I'm so happy we're talking about it today. Is butter.

Oh my gosh, I want to hear all about your butter making process.

It's not a process, you know. I'm a progressive why I have been making my own butter for years. Just when I heard it's like one ingredient, I was like, what I didn't know? It was just you know, heavy cream. Although French butter is cultured, right, is that what you say it?

Yeah, French butter's cultured.

So I'm gonna start doing that where I culture it and then shake it because all you do. I got a butter turn thing from Amazon. I was like the worst thing ever. You just get a jar, like a big old Mason jar. I pour a whole little carton like the little cartons of heavy cream, and you shake it in that jar for about fifteen minutes. And I'll watch a TV show, I'll be watching a documentary and

And then because Thanksgiving, I make.

A lot of butter, and so I need like extra shakers, but that's it. And then I put honey if I want honey butter for biscuits, and I put Garlicok, if I want garlic butter for a stack, I put salted you know, obviously salted butter. But in France they culture it and so cultured butter. You know, it just requires high quality heavy cream and a live bacteria, so usually yogurt butter milk, and that creates this like tangy rich butter. And what you do is you mix the heavy cream

That sounds so good.

And how do when you shake it, is it room temperature or is it chilled?

Well, if I.

Culture it, it'll be room temperature, okay, so you don't refrigerate it.

Then once you shake it and it's like butter, you rinse out the butter milk that comes off of it. It's like really really milky water and you're left with this butter and you really have to squeeze out all that water.

And that's how it does and go rantsid. If you leave.

Water in it, it can go rancid pretty fast.

I have a butterbell on my counter.

I don't put I don't put my butter in the fridge saying steak for the counter.

I have a butterbell and I love that thing. It's the coolest thing. It keeps it fresh and spreadable. Because the spreadable butters that we use are so processed here in the US that it's like it's not good that it's that spreadable. If it's cold and it's spreadable, there's some it's not just butter. There's something else in there for sure.

Well, Valentine's is around the corner, and I just want to say to you my day.

You're my butter.

Half, you're my buttery.

We are butter together, my friend. So speak of Valentine's Day.

My anniversary, my wedding anniversary is November seventeenth, which is also National Butter Day.

Oh my god, is it always November seventeenth or does it move Butter Day?

It's always no November seventeenth. I just realized. I just learned this, and I love that. It's like, now I have two.

Things to celebrate, to celebrate.

I love all the butter idioms, like butter, you better butter them up before you ask.

It's so funny butter fingers. When someone's clumsy who drops things all the time. I'm a total butter fingers. I'm quite quite a klutz, quite a glutz. So let's talk about where butter began.

Okay, butter had to begin once we started, I guess hurting animals because it had to come from milk. So so it wasn't that long ago. How long ago was it and who should we applaud for this amazing invention?

It was a bird long Yeah, it was a long time ago, like ten thousand years ago, like in the Fertile Crescent, right, So just like you said, yeah, early herders they realized, Okay, milk isn't something that you just drink, right, Milk could transform And they realized when they were trying to keep this butter, you know, fresh, they were putting it in animals skins and transporting it and this movement right when you know your your animal skin is full

So this is how they realized.

So butter wasn't really invented, it was discovered.

Well, the Fertile percent is also.

Like that that boomerang shape region in the Middle East, which is like modern day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, parts of Turkey, so like that that like basically the cradle of civilization, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a birthplace of agriculture, right, everything everything, So of course butter was discovered there as well.

Yes, exactly exactly, and it was really valuable. Like the value of the butter was recognized right away because it was riching calories, it lasted a lot longer than milk, and this was of course before refrigeration. It was easy to carry. So from the very beginning it's like, oh my god.

Butter is valuable.

Wow.

And then when did butter, I guess over time take on a I guess a deeper meaning like it did it ever become sacred or like ritual in some places?

Yeah, in India, especially ghe, which is this clarified butter. Right, you separate the fats from the from the solids and then so the gee it's the milk solids are then caramelized, and so in India they start using things.

Like ghe in rituals.

And in northern Europe it signified prosperity and they used to make ornate sculptures and just for nomadic cultures around the world, it represented mobility and survival, and eventually it became one of the defining flavors of global trade and in tables around the world, right, because everybody's just butter. I mean, you know some places like you know, like Italy that you see more olive oil, right, but still like butter is really central to tables around the world.

Doing searching for France when you're talking about olive oil. I made the mistake. We were in Provence, in the south of France, and I said, uh, he was cooking something, and I go let me, yes, butter, because I associate France with butter. And he was like, no, only the north is butter, you know, north Paris and north of Paris is butter.

The rest of France is olive oil.

And I was like Mediterranean, yeah, which is funny because I was like, I always just think everything in France is cooked in butter.

A lot, but maybe yeah, not everything, right, Yeah, but there's even like so many myths and legends around butters, right, And so like we said, it was this ritual substance embedded in these you know, fertility and abundance and and I love this idea of like in Hindu traditions they use that ghi for you know, for for rituals.

And the god, Yes, Krishna.

I was in India and saw a lot of krishnas O.

I've never been to India, but I didn't. I didn't find butter.

It was a big well ghee or yes, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right, yeah.

Yeah, it's the ge. It's the ge. What was it used for?

GHI?

So they use it for cooking, but they also use in rituals and Krishna, the god Krishna is described in devotional literature as stealing butter as a child. So it's used in ceremonies, you know, as an offering.

So it's used a.

Lot in Southeast Asia, and even in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, they use butter to create these ritual sculpture called tormas, and they displayed these they would made them out of butter and roasted barley and these are just they transformed them into these sacred offerings as the symbol food for for deities and spirits. And so it's sort of central.

I will say, if it's not French butter, the second one that I that comes close other than my own is Irish butter. I don't know why, Like does Ireland do something different? They also kind of have this ritual religious thing behind butter.

Too, right, Yeah, Ireland really has an interesting history. They have like some really ancient butters have been discovered in Ireland, something called bog butter, and it's like like two thousand year old butters have been discovered. So they put them in these like animal skins or clay pots or something and bury them in peat and so it's like this moss and it would kind of transform them into like a sort of waxy substance, and it represents these stored

So Latin America because we're not a big butter I mean I think we are in Texas because we have flower tortillas and like, let me tell you something, and flower tortilla with French butter in the morning, there's nothing better.

My son does that all the time. He's like, you know, gett on a darbia but with French butter. That's so funny.

Well there's that Texas better than the fan Furia's butter. Yeah, good butter. There are ranches firm that's a good butter.

Fan Furia. But in Latin America.

It was only because of colonialism that that butter arrived.

It never really took off.

It didn't take off. We don't really see it in native cosmologies like we do in other parts of the world. Yeah, we see it in.

The in the Pandulce.

We did a whole Bandulte episode and we talked a little bit about better there, but we don't really see it again.

A lot of the Banducee was influenced by the French bakeries. Yes, papers in Mexico, so they brought their.

Butter with them.

In Ireland and Scotland, early modern folklore records, there was this belief that butter production could be harmed by witches or fairies.

So if butter didn't churn, they would.

Use these productive practices that just you know, placing an iron near churns or were signing prayers during churning just to make sure that the butter was okay.

You knew you had a witch in your house. Yeah, it was valuable.

You said it was pretty valuable, So it was obviously traded that had value.

It was super valuable.

Like by the Middle Ages in Europe, butter was just this major commodity it was packed in barrels tax traded across Ireland and Scandinavian, you know, Normandy. There were trading ports in northern Europe that had entire markets devoted, you know, just to butter. But even like before that in ancient India, in Egypt, it was a symbol of wealth, right, and these butters were export or imported from cooler regions and it was prized for medicine and ritual use.

So they've been you know, butter is something.

That has been traded at scale for literally thousands of years.

So when did we start using it in baking? Because that was a good idea, Yes, that was a really good idea. I us that's what I think of butter. I think baking.

So we start seeing it in baking around the ninth century or so in medieval Europe we start seeing it,

Well, you know, I bake, I make my like today it's Sundays for me or like the food prep.

For the week.

I make my chodal beans which will turn into refrent beans. I make my creamer, my coffee creamer, I make my butter, and I make my bread, and the whole house every Sunday just smells like butter.

Gosh.

Yeah, so butter just transformed every day baked goods into delicious treats.

Yeah, and we covered some of this, we covered some of this in our earlier in the season. But when pastry shops first open, the oldest one being in Paris, the pastry chef of Louis the fifteenth and you know, when the monarchy fell, all of these amazing talented artisanal people like needed to do something, so they ended up opening shops. The chocolate tear opened a shop, the baker opened a shop, the chef opened a restaurant because it wasn't really a thing.

Before that in the monarchy.

Lots to do with butter, yeah, and also just just really quickly, like the banavedias, they feed sort of everyday staples, right that have my gets and you know rolls, just staples that feed.

A community based.

Pastry shops are much more indulgent things with butter, like croissants and night claires and like things that are butter full and beautiful as well. It's like when you look at a little fruit tart, it's it's a work of art.

Yeah yeah, So who really like who brought I guess who elevated baking to high art?

Because when you go to France, like one.

Of these concoctions at one of the highest you know, patisseries or pastry shops can run like forty dollars. I mean, like for this one little gorgeous little thing. I remember I paid eighty five dollars for this like Mango creation. Like, who who said I'm gonna elevate baking to high art?

Oh my gosh, this guy. His name is Marie Antoine Karem. He's also known as Antonym Karem. And he is such an interesting character, right, he was like a true rags to riches story. He was born in seventeen eighty three. He was born in the slums of Paris. They believed that he was one of twenty three children. And in when he was nine years old during the French Revolution, and he was taken in by the owner of a chop house, right, a top house near the gaillotine.

What's it like a meat? Like a steak like they would they would butchery, but like a butchery, yes, okay.

And he he washed dishes right in exchange for a roof over his head. And when he turned sixteen, he was apprenticing at a patisserie. Right, so he was apprenticing his super bright. His boss encouraged him to get an education. He taught himself to read and write, and he would go to the library and he would study architecture and classical you know, arches like Greek architecture and Roman architecture and columns, and he started recreating this architectural forms with sugar and pastry.

Wow, which of.

Course, butter is what helps you know, keep these things, you know, give things their shape and their texture and their wow, their their their shininess and everything. And so he started staging thees in window displays and eventually he opened up his own pastry shop. He was reviewed by Grimaud de la Arronier. We talked about him in our Food Critics episode. He called his pastries exquisite in crisp to perfection.

And he didn't just open anyway. He opened near Plus Bondome, which is like to the spot today. It's where the it's carl it is. It's like it's one of the most famous plazas and so it's so it's it's so interesting that in the seventeen hundreds, you know, this was where his shop was.

Wow, even then it was the place he was so you know, his art. He elevated, you know, food to this fine art. And he's the one that really transformed us. He even made Napoleon's wedding cake. Like he invented the pastry bag. He illustrated his own cookbooks. He claimed to have invented the shoe pastry and volevants and perfect souit fls like you know, he he and he was also the first chef to gain wealth and fame through publishing

I will bank Koram for that price as well.

Yeah, pastry is only good as it's butter, not only it's ingredients.

But like, really the real star is butter. It is.

It is my favorite bakery in la Is Petti Grand bu Lingerie in Santa Monica, owned by a really good friend of mine.

Her stuff is unbelievable.

Last week I had to sit down with my friend Clemonsta Loots from the Santa Monica bakery pettigran Bulanerie. We talked about the current political climate, her presence in the community, and she taps into bread's long history of labor care and quiet revolution.

Today I'm talking to her about butter.

So why is butter such a foundational ingredient in baking, especially compared to oils or margarine.

So the reason that I prefer butter over margarine is because butter contains lactose, which contains sugar, which creates drowning, which creates the Mayas reaction, which gives you a depth of flavor and color that you cannot get from a hydrogenated fat. So margarine and shortening are hydrogenated, which means that there are oils with oil does not contain any water. Oils that are hydrogenated partially or fully and go from

Oh interesting, that makes perfect sense. I never really understood the why that makes.

Perfect If you have like a shortening butter cream, it just kind of sticks to the roof of your mouth a little bit and the sugar crystallizes a lot because it can't dissolve as well.

Your croissants are the best croissants ever, the most amazing. So can you walk us through the steps of the lamination and how laminated dough turns butter into these edible amazingly.

Okay, yeah, oh, I love talking about this because making clos is actually not that difficult.

It starts for us.

It's a three day process that starts with a sponge with like whole grain flowers, yeast and flour and water. And then the next day we mix our dough with more whole grains, bread, flour, water, yeast. We use organic dark brown sugar and that preferment, and then we lay it out in a pan. We do this thirty two times on most days, and then we put in a

It's ec needs.

From France, but unfortunately it's now fifty two percent owned by a big Chinese conglomerate rather than being entirely farmer owned. So you know, it's one of those decisions that we're playing with, and we'd love to start our own butterer company, but more on that later, and gosh, yeah, it's a very long term project. But the butter, most importantly is cultured. So when you're at the grocery store and you see sweet cream. It doesn't mean that this sugar added to it.

Guess what A lot of people don't know this. Croissants roots aren't French. Yeah, I did not know this.

It's so many times in Paris I'm passing by a bakery and it'll say a Vienna luise in Paris, which it's basically a lingerie from.

Vienna.

Because the original person that really introduced this Viennese baking was in Paris was Austrian and so I think his name was August Zang, right, August Sang. He popularized the pastry which was it and it was a crescent. It was a crescent shaped pastry made with a lot of butter or lard, but his was sometimes sweetened with almonds

Moon on the Ottoman flag. I don't know if it's true, but it is a good story. It's a really good story. Yeah.

So then but then this well, this food history in Jim Chevalier says, the croissant was born the moment that kip fell. The kip fell made its way to France, and then it met puff pastry and now and then it transformed into something new. So technically, like the shape and the butter, and like the fact that it was a pastry was Austrian. But this Austrian businessman August saying, he opened uh Viennese bakery in Paris, and he was like this marketing genius and he did the window displays

Pan of water? Trade water that just steams inside.

And that gives you the crispy outside on your when your back at So Parisians went wild for these kit fells, and then bakeries all over we're imitating them.

Uh.

And then the croissant became a Parisian breakfast staple.

Even Charles Dickens raved about them on a visit to Paris.

God, I love a good croissant. It's one of my favorite things.

Well, and you know what I want to know, how did industrialization or the you know, the indust the Industrial Revolution change butter production.

It changed everything where the Industrial Revolution changed everything.

So, before industrialization, butter was very hands on, very small scale. You know, farmers or households would turn there our own creamy they you know.

They would have the thing you would see the butter maids exactly.

Yeah, some butter maids exactly, just making enough for their family or to sell at a local market. And the flavor was always different depending on the season, depending on what the.

Cows and they say.

The reason why French butter tastes so amazing, and not only French butter, it's from Brittany and Normandy, like it's from the north of France, is because it's that grass that the cows eat in the north. So you could have the same cow eat something else in the south and it's not as good as the butter in the north of France. So it does that makes sense that the flavor buried with the season, with the cow, with the grass.

It greed.

I mean, you taste, you taste it, the grass, you taste the landscape. You should be able to taste the lands. You should be We don't in the United States, but like, yeah, in France you can taste. You're like, hmm, this smells like tastes like rain. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, totally for sure. It So then they made these mechanical churns so that the separation could be faster and more efficient, and then they could make butter and these massive quantities.

But then why did they start refrigerating it?

Well, because it was just it was it was I wondered they started easy to transport it, Yeah, it just lasts longer, you know, to transfert it, and when when they started doing all of these separators and turns and all this butter was standardized package sold nationally internationally. So it also like it brought consistency, and you know, a lot of these small dairy farmers they just really couldn't compete with the sort of pane.

Those traditional methods were abandoned, and then these regional flavors and textures were like lost because now it just became so mechanized.

So wait, is this where the story of margarine begins.

Nineteenth century for sure, So in the eighteen Sea Sties and berer Napoleon the third he was looking for cheap, shelf stable butter to substitute, you know, to feed his army, to be able to feed the working class because butter was expensive and butter spoiled really quickly. So a chemist named Hippolyte meg Murier invented oleomargarine. So evented this margarine from beef fat, milk and some multifiers, and it worked

Margarine was process progress. Butter processed. It was, yes, it was sold.

It was a highly processed but by the late you know, twentieth century, these sort of transfats and hydrogenated margins were lickd to heart disease. And then butter was back. Right, Butter is natural. But we're seeing it today too, with olive oil spreads and plant based butter and not based butter. And you know, but I don't know, there's nothing like the really good stuff.

Now, there's no substitute for good butter. There's not.

I encourage everybody make your own butter. I'll actually link my recipe here even though it's not and it's it's you know, shake some heavy cream. That's it, shakes for a long time and your I add flu de sail because I like that taste more than sea salt in my butter. I don't like sea Salt's a little too salty. I like honey. Like I said, I like garlic butter. You can add parsley. It's just it's so fun because then you start just making all kinds of butter.

How long does it last when you have it out? When you make the butters, well, we go through it so fast, so I don't know. It's never made it to the it's never made.

It's always empty, and I'm always having to make new butter, so I don't know how long it lasts. On the Conca, which is another Mexican pastry, does have French roots.

So if you want to hear all about that, go back to season one. Listen to the Bandul's episode. It is so good.

Thank you guys for listening, and thank you to my butter half minday.

Thank you all for listening, and yes, thank you to My Butter Half, My Taste, Butter, My Taste, Butter Date by Off Bye.

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