Love Notes #4: Butter

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Every time my friend Coco (French, effortless, you know the drill) comes back from France, she arrives at my door with a heavenly and sacred gift. Demi sel beurre, a specifically French brand (Grand Fermage). While you can get delicious French butter in the UK, nothing tastes quite like this. Slice into it and you’ll find thick little crystals of salt hidden inside, a sign of deliciousness if there ever was on. Perfect both at room and fridge temperature, depending on what it’s going with.

A personal guide:

I prefer my butter to be salty. For a ham sandwich, I like it out of the fridge for an hour or so, sliced as thick as cheese, lightly spread across a warm, doughy, crusty baguette and topped with paper-thin slices of ham. Cracked black pepper, maybe two cornichons sliced in half. A lighter spreading on the second side of the baguette – you want to taste the cream.

With boiled eggs and a few slices of comté, the butter is room temperature, placed not spread, onto smaller pieces of bread – the yolk firm in its white embrace, oozing right into the middle. The cheese, peeled not sliced, rests atop, mimicking the butter but with a tart little edge.

Fridge cold, sliced with a sharp knife, into a cold pan until it melts and the orange-hued yolks can turn into trembling little rounds, moved not scrambled around the pan, edge further and further towards heaven.

Butters to buy: Grand Fermage (when in France); Kerrygold (for frying); M&S French salted butter (for breakfast); Payson Breton demi sel (for ham sandwiches); Ampersand (small batch cultured and fancy); Lurpack (for spreading – one of my favourites for holiday eggs!).

Butter has never scared me. Not like how fries become lodged in my throat or pasta feels like it’s coating my stomach – the form too soft, the curved edges too appealing, how it goes with anything, melting religiously.

Of course there are exceptions and even when hungry, have decided never to butter a piece of Ryvita (too dry) or to melt it into health-grade grains (it just doesn’t make sense). But yes to spooning miso into its soft folds and spreading it over a crumpet, placing fridge-cold avocado thinly sliced and fanned, then adding a tangle of pea shoots and a boiled egg atop with a drizzle of dressing. Yes to melting it into a bowl of rice, or better yet, crisping rice in its bubbling pools on a hot heavy cast iron pan. Yes to it being mixed with chopped chives and radishes, rolled and turned into a centrepiece at a dinner party, finished with smoked salt. Yes to dropping it into the pan where a silky sauced pasta lets off heat and stirring it through for a crescendo of cream.

I suppose it reminds me of my dad. The butter is always French, always salted, always sat in a white enamel dish adorned with fruit in the middle of our kitchen table, messily tucked into with breakfast or lunch. “Would you like any bread with your butter?” we might say to each other, smiling, as it melts slowly on our tongues.