Contemporary Authors

1. Butter : a rich history LCCN 2016018795 Type of material Book Personal name Khosrova, Elaine, author. Main title Butter : a rich history / Elaine Khosrova. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016. Description xviii, 344 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm ISBN 9781616203641 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER SF263 .K46 2016 Copy 1 Request in Reference - Science Reading Room (Adams, 5th Floor)

• workman - https://www.workman.com/authors/elaine-khosrova

  Elaine Khosrova is an independent writer who specializes in stories about food history and gastronomic culture. A former pastry chef and fellowship student at the Culinary Institute of America, Elaine holds a BS in food and nutrition. She began her career in food publishing as a test kitchen editor at Country Living magazine, followed by staff positions at Healthy Living, Classic American Home, and Santé Magazine. In 2007, she received a Gold Folio journalism award, and in 2008 she became the founding editor of culture, a national consumer magazine about specialty cheese that continues to serve cheese enthusiasts. She’s contributed to numerous national food and lifestyle publications, as well as the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Cheese. After many excursions into the world of dairy for the sake of cheese lit, Elaine left culture magazine in 2013 to begin research on her book about butter--the first and only publication (thus far) to chronicle the life and times of this beloved fat. Her butter chase took Elaine throughout the United States and to France, Ireland, India, Bhutan, and Canada. She’s never been the same. An avid cook, baker, traveler, camper, cyclist, and musician, Elaine lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley.

• hawthorne valley - https://hawthornevalley.org/about/people/board-of-trustees/

  Elaine is the founding editor-in-chief of culture, a quarterly national consumer magazine and website dedicated to covering the origins and producers of specialty cheese and dairy. She has been a staff editor and food writer for Country Living, Fine Cooking, Yankee, Self, Plate, Santé, and many other publications. Elaine is also the winner of a 2007 Gold Folio publishing award and has served as a James Beard Journalism Award judge. A former pastry chef who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and La Varenne in Paris, Elaine has an undergraduate degree in food and nutrition. In December 2016, her book, “Butter, A Rich History” was published by Algonquin Books. Living in Chatham, New York, she and her husband, Mitchell, are parent alumni of Hawthorne Valley School; their son, Alex, graduated with the class of 2005 and their daughter, Luca Pearl, graduated in 2012.

• munchies - https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/why-butter-is-good-for-you

  Why Butter Is Good For You
  NR

  Nick Rose

  Apr 8 2017, 10:00am
  "I was not expecting to find the metaphysical life of butter."

  You almost certainly love butter.

  But even if you don't, you are, biologically speaking, hardwired to love the rich, pale yellow stuff that emerges from the churning of cream. That's not really up for debate.

  Anyways, you probably don't love butter as much as Elaine Khosrova, a writer and former pastry chef who embarked on a years-long to France, Ireland, India, Bhutan, and Canada in a quest to better understand butter. The end result is Butter: A Rich History, a deep dive into butter that journeys through millennia of cultural research and spreads across three continents.

  Khosrova's book is as much about the cutting edge of health research as it is about ancient rituals, so we caught up with her to better understand the many myths (modern and ancient) surrounding the famous fat.
  Elaine Khosrova, author of Butter: A Rich History. All photos by or courtesy of Elaine Khosrova.

  MUNCHIES: Hi, Elaine. So, how long have humans been eating butter for?
  Elaine Khosrova: At least 10,000 years. We can't know precisely, but it definitely parallels the domestication of animals very early on. It probably wasn't even cows' butter that humans started making butter with, but goat or sheep or even yak butter.

  Why do you think that butter remains popular across so many cultures?
  Because it's so delicious. It's just an incredible food when you think about its applications. Depending on its temperature, it has a lot of different uses. If you melt it, you can make sauces and things like that. At a soft room temperature, you can cream it to make cookies and cakes and frostings. And if it's hard, you can layer it to make pastries like pies, croissants, or puff pastries. From a practical point of view, it has so many applications.

  What do you think the biological underpinnings of that are?
  As humans, we're wired to love fat because it gives us such sustenance. It's very satisfying. It gives us a lot of energy. Fat carries a lot of flavor and that taste doesn't just disappear out of your mouth right away. We're wired to love butter.

  So our bodies are designed to perceive butter as super tasty, but is it good for you?
  I think it is, but I really do distinguish between grass-fed butter and industrial butter that relies on feedlot milk and cream, which is definitely more diminished when it comes to micronutrients. For many thousands of years, people have been eating grass-fed butter, and we're trying to bring it back. It's only during the last hundred years that we haven't been eating it, because of the industrialization of dairy. We've really changed the cow a lot and how it's eating.

  How much butter did people eat back in the day?
  In the early 1900s, in North American, people were eating, on average, 17 pounds of butter each per year. In Europe it was probably even more, but there was very little heart disease. By the end of the century, butter consumption dropped because of all the anti-fat campaigns that we were subjected to. So it went to 17 pounds to about four-and-a-half pounds of butter per year.

  But heart disease started becoming a real problem.
  Heart disease exploded—it was off the charts by the end of the century.

  Life expectancy was a lot lower a century ago; is it possible that people didn't live long enough to get heart disease?
  That's a really complicated issue. I think it has a lot more to do with processed food and margarine and the introduction of trans fats. It's bad stuff. We've gotten really good at improving the mechanics of the heart with stents and bypass, but our diets are still really unhealthy because they rely on processed foods and there is so much sugar in our diets.

  So how do you navigate these strange waters as a consumer?
  I would say to eat more like our ancestors do, if you even can at this point.

  Can you even get grass-fed butter in North America?
  Sure, you can. It's sometimes called pasture butter, depending on the brand. But there are nice, affordable options out there, especially regionally.

  How did fat and butter become the enemy?
  It's hard to capsulize in a brief interview, but I will say that there were scientists who really strongly believed that the fat you eat ends up as fat in your body. We know that that's not really how things work, but it made so much sense intuitively that politicians grabbed onto it. And then it became diet policy, and once it became policy, it just took off.

  How so?
  Between the food companies who wanted to make new low-fat products for us and promote those to the nutrition and medical community who were desperately seeking a cure for heart disease, it was a perfect theory. But now we know it's so much more complex than that and sugar presents a lot of problems for your heart and can actually increase your cholesterol level.

  What about reports that the sugar industry paid academics to undertake favorable research?
  That was in the days when you didn't have to disclose who was supporting your research. Scientists were being discredited for writing about how bad sugar was, and the vegetable oil industry was also very powerful in getting people to jump on the anti-animal-fat bandwagon.
  When you start looking at the politics of food in our country, it's very frightening.

  What is frightening about that?
  The forces behind the scenes. You think you're getting solid scientific evidence—unbiased—but there are biases all over the place and it takes a lot of research.

  Does butter affect everyone the same way?
  Trying to find a one-size-fits-all diet plan is kind of crazy. I can eat starch forever and ever and not gain weight, but my best friend has to stay away from it. It's just one example, but we really don't have the same constitutions.

  What's really cool about your book is the cross-cultural and travel angles used to explore butter in different regions and climates. What do you think the big misconceptions about butter are for North Americans?
  It's definitely that saturated fat is bad for you. I fight against that constantly. It's a vast category. Coconut oil is very saturated, which is why it becomes solid at room temperature, and yet everyone extolls it as a health food. And it is healthy.

  You travelled all over the place studying butter. What was the biggest surprise?
  I was most astonished by the fact that butter was used as a sacred tool in many cultures around the world. The Vedic Aryans who preceded the Hindus in India worshipped the fire god Agni, and one of the rituals was throwing butter into a fire, which made it crackle and dance, all the while the read these verses and praises of butter. In ancient Ireland, they would give butter as an offering to the fairies because they were thought to be mischievous and harbingers of bad luck.

  So butter actually has spiritual importance
  Also, in Tibet butter—where they constantly drink butter tea—carving remains central to Tibetan Buddhist worship. They take yak butter, color it, and create these exquisite sculptures of their deities that they would place on altars before prayer. I was not expecting to find the metaphysical life of butter.

  I'm glad you did.
  So am I. Thanks.

  Thanks for talking with us.

• algonquin - http://algonquin.com/book/butter/

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  Elaine Khosrova is an independent writer who specializes in stories about food history and gastronomic culture. A former pastry chef and fellowship student at the Culinary Institute of America, Elaine holds a BS in food and nutrition. She began her career in food publishing as a test kitchen editor at Country Living magazine, followed by staff positions at Healthy Living, Classic American Home, and Santé Magazine. In 2007, she received a Gold Folio journalism award, and in 2008 she became the founding editor of culture, a national consumer magazine about specialty cheese that continues to serve cheese enthusiasts. She’s contributed to numerous national food and lifestyle publications, as well as the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Cheese. After many excursions into the world of dairy for the sake of cheese lit, Elaine left culture magazine in 2013 to begin research on her book about butter–the first and only publication (thus far) to chronicle the life and times of this beloved fat. Her butter chase took Elaine throughout the United States and to France, Ireland, India, Bhutan, and Canada. She’s never been the same. An avid cook, baker, traveler, camper, cyclist, and musician, Elaine lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley.

• linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaine-khosrova-05317011

  Elaine Khosrova

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• splendid table - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/from-milk-to-magic-understanding-the-rich-history-of-butter

  From milk to magic, understanding the rich history of butter
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  You’d think that a book about butter would be filled with recipes, but that is exactly what Elaine Khosrova’s book Butter: A Rich History is not filled with. Instead it is brimming with ritual, history, politics and science. (Truthfully, there are a few recipes.) Elaine writes about food and is the former editor of Culture, a magazine all about cheese. She has traveled the world researching her butter book. Contributor Melissa Clark talked with her about his discoveries.

  Melissa Clark: One of the surprises for me in reading your book was to learn about the connection between butter and religion. Can you tell us about that?

  Elaine Khosrova: That subject was interesting and surprising for me, too. I wasn't expecting to find that ancient cultures around the world used butter as a sacred tool for their spiritual practices. This is going back to the Sumerians 2,500 B.C., and the Vedic Aryans, the Druids, the Hindus, the Buddhists. All of these cultures used butter in their worship practices. Most of these rituals are gone, but the Tibetan Buddhists still do these elaborate butter carvings called tormas that are central to their spiritual practice.

  MC: What do you think gives butter that kind of aura that makes it seem religious or spiritual?

  EK: For most of butter’s history, the process of making butter was mysterious. It was an enigma. How is it that you can take milk, and through a process of simply rocking or beating it, this invisible fat that's in the milk suddenly blooms into beautiful pieces of butter? Until the late 1800s, butter was little understood but highly valued. It was deemed much like pearls and oysters, or rainbows, some of these wonderful mysteries in the world. That was at that root of why butter became so useful in a sacred way, for what it symbolized.

  MC: Which is magic.

  EK: Magic, exactly.

  Elaine Khorsova (Photo: Wendy Noyes)
  Elaine Khosrova (Photo: Wendy Noyes)

  MC: Historically, women have always played a big role in butter making. Would you talk a little bit about that?

  EK: It's not overstating it to say that women founded the butter industry, because it was taboo for men to have anything to do with the dairy arts for most of history, or since we've been milking animals. I found this across the world, this taboo against men milking, making butter, doing cheese making, and that survived up until the 1800s. Milk is about birth, lactation, and fertility. It’s very much a sort of feminine domain. And because they had a monopoly on butter making they gained a certain status from it, because butter was valuable.

  MC: You got to see some of this firsthand. I know you traveled to India and you got to see some traditional butter making.

  EK: I went specifically to see the butter that's made from water buffalo milk. That would be the traditional milk in India, and it was for centuries. That was the animal most suited to the climate in India, and so water buffalo butter is their traditional butter. It's not disappearing. Cow butter has become more prevalent, but the water buffalo butter is the cultured product that I was particularly interested in seeing how they make it.

  I was able to go to a small village in the north of India, in Punjab, and meet with two elderly women. They showed me how they take the water buffalo milk and culture it overnight. They make this super-delicious, rich yogurt called dahi and that is put into a churn. A generation ago, it would have been a beautiful metal churn. This particular day that I was visiting they put it into a plastic bucket. But they still used their unique system of churning, which involves a pole, a center pole that has a cross-piece on the bottom, that goes into the milk. They alternately pull on the ends of a rope. Imagine this center pole is being spun around by the women pulling on the ropes on either side, back and forth. That system of churning doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. I wanted to document that because it is disappearing. Even in this particular remote village, the women tell me that they now use a blender to make their butter. I was glad to document and see it. In a generation, it probably won't exist anymore.

  Butter: A Rich History

  MC: You mentioned that it was cultured butter. I know that I can buy cultured butter in the supermarket. I can also buy a lot of different butters: high-fat European butter, sheep butter, goat butter. Can you walk us through the differences?

  EK: We'll start with the simplest first: that would be sweet cream butter. That is butter that's simply cream put into a churn until butter happens, and if it's an industrial churn it happens in three seconds. It's just cream made into butter. If you have cultured butter, it means that the cream has been mixed with a lactic bacteria and allowed to ferment at least 12 hours, usually longer. The point of that is to develop complexity of flavor in the cream. Butter has 120 different flavor compounds, and by culturing it you can intensify some of the really good ones like diacetyl, the compound that gives us that quintessential butter flavor. Culturing is synonymous with a little bit of acidity. If you can balance the sweet, acid, and butteriness, that’s a world-class butter. Then there’s the “European" style. That means a high-fat butter, higher fat because the standard in the United States is for 80 percent fat in a stick of butter. The European-style higher fat butters can have 82-86 percent fat, which may not sound like a lot of difference, but when you're a baker, it makes a whole lot of difference.

  MC: Would you say to bake with the European butter and if you going to spread some butter on bread and eat it, use the cultured butter for the extra flavor.

  EK: That's what I prefer. As far as baking, the higher fat butter is particularly good for pastry. If I'm making a cake, I don't feel like the extra butter fat makes much of a difference. The only exception would be a pound cake where I want that super rich density.

  MC: Talk to us about how butter gains its different flavors. You wrote in the book that the flavor of butter comes from three different things: the type and species of animal, the animal's diet, and human artistry.

  EK: Three very dynamic things affect the character of a butter: the person, the plant, and the animal. The plant aspect, in particular, has a huge effect the butter. Animals can be fed grain or grass, and there's quite a variation in the butters that you get from that. Not only the flavor, but nutritionally. A grass-fed butter definitely has more micronutrients in it than a butter that's from cows that are fed grain.

  MC: And that changes seasonally?

  EK: Certainly in places where there's winter. But even then they're having a lot of silage and haylage. They're having fermented grass in addition to a little bit of grain. We do have a really good system in place for keeping cows on grass year-round. I tell people butter is such a staple and if you're going to have a little bit every day on your toast or your potato, I think it's really worth seeking out a good grass-fed butter.

• elle canada - http://www.ellecanada.com/culture/books/article/you-had-us-at-a-book-about-butter

  Books
  Sep 28, 2016
  You had us at 'a book about butter'
  By: Sarah Laing
  Interview with Elaine Khosrova

  “I found a Buddhist nun about two hours from where I live who has this incredible expertise in Tibetan butter culture, and so I found myself spending time with nuns drinking tea and learning about their lives.”
  null

  Butter: Is there a more beautiful word in the English language? Especially now that full-fat everything is trendy again. Granted, vegans and the lactose averse might disagree, but after reading Butter, Elaine Khosrova’s fascinating history of that glorious, golden unctuous substance, we hope they’d at least have an academic appreciation for a product that is eaten (and beloved) in cultures everywhere from Ireland to Bhutan and made from the milk of animals as diverse as camels and yaks.

  “I spent my entire publisher’s advance on travel,” says Khosrova, a recipe developer and former test-kitchen editor. And although her travels took her to some far-flung places (climbing 14,000 feet up a mountain in Bhutan to meet traditional herders who make yak butter springs to mind), it was actually a local encounter that stands out the most: “I found a Buddhist nun about two hours from where I live [in the Hudson Valley, N.Y.] who has this incredible expertise in Tibetan butter culture, and so I found myself spending time with nuns drinking tea and learning about their lives. I remember walking out and thinking how extra-ordinary it was that butter had taken me there.”

  When asked for her favourite butter “cocktail-party fun fact,” Khosrova offers two, which actually neatly mirror the two major focuses of the book. The first is historical (the first student protest in American history was actually some students at pre-American Revolution Harvard raising a fuss over rancid butter in the caf), and the other is scientific (how much fine-tuned calibration goes into the industrial production of butter). And that’s the thing about this book: It’ll take forever to read only because you’ll be poking the person next to you every five minutes to tell them something fascinating you learned about the importance of cows in the history of women’s work, or how Indians are the world’s largest consumers of butter, or how still-edible butter was found buried in an Irish bog that dates back hundreds of years.
  Oh, and the book has another major selling point: It has a recipe section in the back chock full of ways you can worship at the altar of liquid gold yourself. “I really do love the golden buttermilk cake recipe,” says Khosrova, who also singles out the butterscotch candies and the crumb cake. “Have [those] in your repertoire and you’re set.”

Butter: A Rich History
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p80.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Butter: A Rich History

Elaine Khosrova. Algonquin, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-61620-364-1

Former pastry chef Khosrova shines a spotlight on butter, a simple, ubiquitious staple. Khosrova's history is intimate and far-reaching, whether sampling the butter produced at farms in remote regions of the world or peeking into middle-class pantries. Throughout, she explores ancient and modern practices of creaming, churning, flavoring, and selling butter. She even includes discussions on margarine's shady past and how it went from a cost-effective butter replacement to a health and marketing quagmire. Khosrova, who has worked at Country Living and Healthy Living magazines and has an obvious passion for food, pays homage to longtime butter-making traditions in India, Bhutan, Tibet, France, and the U.S. She discusses, among other things, camel butter, how some butter emits a golden aura, and how, before the industrial revolution, a dairy maid could always find a job. The book opens with an ode to butter by poet Elizabeth Alexander, and closes with an appendix on with how to say butter in over 50 languages. Khosrova's ambitious project is a successful, fascinating account of a common dairy product. (Nov.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Butter: A Rich History." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236482&it=r&asid=af07a2f2105c408bc0d8d1f13b39e24b. Accessed 12 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236482

Khosrova, Elaine. Butter: A Rich History
Melissa Stoeger
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p134.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Khosrova, Elaine. Butter: A Rich History. Algonquin. Nov. 2016.368p. photos, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781616203641. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781616206505. COOKING

As a pastry chef, test kitchen editor, and food writer Khosrova is accustomed to seeking out exotic and trendy foods. When asked to rate an array of butters from around the world, the author realized this common staple is more complex than one might imagine. In this debut, she explores the factors and conditions that account for the many variations in taste. The author begins with a review of the historical uses for butter in religious and medicinal practices, as well as the tools and techniques applied in traditional butter making. Industrialization brought about new methods of production and preservation, transforming the butter industry. Traveling the world, Khosrova samples products from all kinds of animals, speaks with scientists about the biology of cows and how diverse environments produce differences in butters, and is schooled in the science of grading butter. Also included are classic recipes with butter as the fundamental ingredient, such as pate brisee, croissants, and puff pastry. VERDICT Although a short read, this enjoyable work packs plenty of fascinating history and science. For fans of food histories such as Dan Koeppel's Banana or Reaktion Books's "Edible" series.--Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stoeger, Melissa. "Khosrova, Elaine. Butter: A Rich History." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 134. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044974&it=r&asid=ccf0c25cf81817cb63e7478e178c6a16. Accessed 12 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044974

Our messed-up relationship with food has a long history. It started with butter
Libby Copeland
(Mar. 22, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Libby Copeland

Have you ever eaten butter by the spoon? Butter without toast to prop it up or eggs to fry in it - butter for its own tangy, full-flavored, exquisite sake?

Elaine Khosrova does this, not infrequently. She warms a variety of types to room temperature, gets a glass of water to clear her palate between rounds and pries delicately at her subjects with scientific curiosity, observing how the different textures yield to her knife. Seven types of butter are in front of her today, made from cow, sheep and goat cream, ranging from a sunny gold to a soft, bridal white.

"You see how totally cohesive this is?" she says, prying at the first and mildest sample, a sweet cow butter made in New Zealand by a brand called Anchor. She slides a slab of the thick, pale yellow Anchor onto her spoon.

The author of "Butter: A Rich History," Khosrova has worked as a pastry chef, at a restaurant trade journal, in a magazine test kitchen and as the editor of a cheese magazine, and she has researched the history of butter going back to the Stone Age. The resident of Hudson Valley, New York, has made it her job to know the differences between conventional and grass-fed, between sweet and cultured (fermented with live cultures). She can explain how tender springtime grass creates butter that's more yellow (it's from the beta carotene in the plants), and, when she's tasting, pick out the diacetyl (that quintessential buttery flavor) and the lactones (they impart a sweetness, she says). She is, in short, a butter savant in a country coming around to butter again.

"It's been downtrodden for so long, between the margarine wars and the diet wars," says Khosrova. Even in the '80s, when "fat was so taboo," she says, "I never gave up on butter."

How, precisely, do you taste-test butter? It turns out it's much like tasting wine, only . . . thicker. Khosrova lifts the spoon, sniffs and slides it into her mouth, the spoon clanking against her teeth.

"I try to kind of keep it in the front of my mouth," she says stickily. "You really want it to dissolve as slowly as possible." She makes a breathy, guttural sound. "You're trying to almost smell from the back of your throat."

Between the initial saltiness and the full-flavored fattiness that coats the tongue and makes everything else seem like a distant dream, Khosrova's palate catches the butter's "terroir." It has "almost, like, a green vegetable quality," she says. "It's so fleeting. It's there and then it's gone."

The amateur tries to catch this subtlety and just winds up with a mouthful of butter. Which is not actually a bad thing.

- - -

Khosrova's book, which was released in November, could not have better timing. In recent years, countless headlines have declared butter "back," amid some science suggesting we may have overrated its health dangers. People are putting butter in their coffee, and the demand for "real food" is pervasive enough that in 2015, McDonald's swapped out margarine for butter in its Egg McMuffin.

Butter's story is a very American story, because the arc of its vilification and subsequent redemption is a parable for how we get food wrong time and again. We alternately demonize and idealize individual ingredients - not just butter but also sugar, caffeine, red wine and supposed miracle foods featured on "The Dr. Oz Show" - and in doing so, we miss the big picture. Even now, at butter's supposed moment of glory, many nutritional scientists worry that the pendulum may be swinging too far in its direction. American food trends are hopelessly reminiscent of Newton's third law, says David L. Katz, founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center: "For every boneheaded action, there's an opposite and equally boneheaded reaction."

But before we get to all that, it helps to go back to the beginning. Khosrova writes that butter is believed to hark back to the Neolithic era. While the exact circumstances of its discovery are unknown, she imagines a herdsman storing milk inside an animal skin. Over the course of many hours, the milk is ripened by bacteria, chilled and agitated by a bumpy ride, causing delicious, golden butter flakes to form, and delighting the herdsman.

Over time, Khosrova says, butter became not just beloved but revered. In ancient Sumeria, people brought butter offerings to a temple to celebrate the union of a fertility goddess with a mythological dairy shepherd. The Vedic Aryans filled their sacred texts with references to butter ("waves of butter flow like gazelles before the hunter," went one hymn), while Tibetan Buddhist monks made sacred butter sculptures for centuries, and still do. Ancient Druids paid homage to a pagan goddess by making butter - "the phallic thrusting of the dasher in the churn" symbolizing "the blessing of fertility," she says. Khosrova says butter was seen as holy by many people in part because they didn't understand how it formed. If things like temperature or fat content weren't right, butter wouldn't emerge at all. Its appearance, therefore, was capricious and special - proof of the goodness of the universe.

"It was really valuable, too," Khosrova says. She is tall and willowy; friendly with a touch of reserve. When she talks dairy, she is scrupulous, sometimes consulting a trade manual that deals with matters such as oxidation and rancidity. "It tasted delicious, it was used as a medicine, it was used for waterproofing." And "it was rich. If you didn't have a lot of animal meat, for instance, you had this richness to sustain you."

By the 16th century, buttermaking was well established as women's domain, but it eventually went male and mechanical during the Industrial Revolution, marked by inventions such as the centrifugal cream separator, and the rise of commercial creameries with big equipment that was believed to require muscly men. By 1887, the annual report of the Nebraska Dairymen's Association was bidding a florid goodbye to the "sound dairymaid," with her "full, rounded arm" and "sweet voice." Not too long after that, butter began its decline.

- - -

The story of butter's shifting fortunes over the past century is complex and messy, featuring a sharp-elbowed war between butter and margarine, changing scientific wisdom over matters such as saturated fat and trans fats, and finger-pointing over an obesity epidemic that has panicked policymakers, advocacy groups and average Americans.

Once upon a time, Americans ate butter unapologetically. In the early 1900s, we consumed more than 18 pounds of butter per person per year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Margarine, invented in 1869 and cheaper than butter, was attacked early on by the dairy industry and subjected to all sorts of regulations. But margarine's fortunes rose over time, assisted by scarce butter supplies during World War II and concerns over the saturated fat in butter, and it surpassed butter in popularity during the 1950s.

More recently, as the health impact of artificial trans fats prevalent in some forms of margarine have come to light, as our interest in more "natural" products has grown, and as sugar has taken its place as the most hated of foodstuffs, butter has come to be revered in many circles, like a long-lost love back from war. Butter consumption surpassed margarine's in 2005, and as of 2014, the average American was consuming 5.6 pounds per year - a 40-year high, though nowhere near where it once was.

In her book, Khosrova writes about the benefits of certain micronutrients in butter, especially the grass-fed kind. And in recent years, research has prompted debates over just how saturated fats affect the body. But many nutritional experts say butter is, at best, a neutral force in the diet and recommend moderation; if we went overboard in demonizing it, neither should we lionize it. "The type of fat we eat is very important, and an optimally healthy diet will be low in butter," emails Harvard doctor and nutritionist Walter Willett. "The central reason for confusion is the issue of to what butter is being compared."

Willett says butter is clearly not as healthful as certain kinds of oil, such as olive, soybean and canola. But on the other hand, replacing butter with carbohydrates doesn't constitute an improvement as far as risk of cardiovascular disease. In other words, if you cut back on butter, sub in olive oil, rather than low-fat cookies.

Katz, of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, says the butter-is-back story line reflects our failure to look at our own diets as a whole.

"We seem to be in a cycle lasting decades of seeking sequential scapegoats. Right now there's a cottage industry in implying that the one thing wrong with our diets is sugar. . . . That doesn't exonerate pepperoni pizza," Katz says. "The focus on a scapegoat invites the food industry to do what they've done to us for decades, and that is keep inventing new kinds of junk food."

- - -

Khosrova is a fan of moderation when it comes to butter, if only because her beloved condiment is packed with calories and so flavorful that a little goes a long way. But on tasting days, moderation is by necessity on hold.

The seven butters on display come from six countries - France, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, England and two from the United States - the priciest being the $24 sheep butter by Haverton Hill Creamery in California which arrives in what looks like a small ice cream tub. All are salted to make comparisons easier.

Over time, even the amateur starts to pick up on the subtleties. There's a butter from Stirling Creamery in Ontario made from whey cream (a byproduct of the cheesemaking process), which has what Khosrova calls an "umami cheesiness" that does a back flip in your mouth. There's a cultured butter from Vermont Creamery that's a startling 86 percent butterfat, rather than the 80 percent of most of the others - it's at once milky and tangy. The French cultured butter from Isigny Ste-Mere, churned in a traditional style, has a wonderful balance, the tanginess mixed with coarse rock salt and a satisfying fatty fullness at the end. Separate from the tasting, Khosrova pulls out a butter-that-shall-not-be-named as an example of what can go wrong; its flavor is marked by a distinct cardboardiness, which she says is likely related to compounds known as aldehydes.

There is so much to know about butter, such as how cows convert plant matter into fatty milk, and why some breeds make better-tasting butter, and what precise combination of elements makes Land O'Lakes taste, Khosrova says, "like my childhood." For "Butter," Khosrova traveled to Bhutan, Ireland, Wisconsin and Iowa; she talked to an animal science expert and an expert in lactation physiology. Abundant milk-producing Holsteins are popular in the dairy world, Khosrova says, but when she makes her own butter, which is often, she uses Jersey cream she gets from a shop about 20 minutes from her home in New York's Hudson Valley. (However, the gold standard, in her opinion, is the "fabulous cream" of Guernsey cows, which is "really hard to find.")

Unlike Khosrova, the amateur unused to eating so much butter at once finds herself slightly queasy four butters in, and a little punchy. (This makes it, again, not unlike a wine tasting.) But she rallies at the end for the pricey sheep butter, which tastes for all the world like the strip of fat you pull off lamb chops, and for a goat butter by Delamere, which is sweet and gamy and somehow - this is hard to describe - tender. It nearly brings tears to the eyes.

"That's so funny," says Khosrova. "Michael Pollan wrote about a butter that he tasted in Spain and he said it was absolutely 'poignant.' That was the word he used."

Another amateur at the tasting asks what the goat butter would pair well with, but the answer is already obvious. Clearly, a spoon.

- - -

Copeland is a former Post reporter who writes on culture and human behavior.

- - -

Cultured Butter

24 tablespoons (makes about 12 ounces)

"Churning" your own butter via a food processor is surprisingly easy; culturing it means introducing a fermenting/acidifying agent that will make the end result richer-tasting and somewhat easier to spread at a cool temperature. Baking experts say it helps produce a more tender crumb.

During the 12 to 24 hours' chilling time, the cream will be tempering, or, as "Butter" author Elaine Khosrova describes it, changing "the crystalline structure of its fats." The buttery flavor and acidity also intensifies a bit more, she says.

Do not knead the final mass of butter on a wooden surface, to avoid picking up any residual odors. If you choose to add salt, keep in mind that 8 tablespoons of commercial salted butter contains about 1/4 teaspoon fine salt.

You'll need an instant-read thermometer and cheesecloth.

We used a small amount of real buttermilk to act as the culturing agent in testing; cultures for making butter and buttermilk are available online via www.cheesemaking.com (New England Cheesemaking Supply).

MAKE AHEAD: The cream-culture mixture needs to rest at room temperature for 16 to 24 hours, then be refrigerated for 12 to 24 hours before processing/churning. For best flavor, the cultured butter can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 month, or frozen for up to 4 months.

Adapted from Khosrova's "Butter: A Rich History" (Algonquin Books, 2016).

Ingredients

1/8 teaspoon freeze-dried Flora Danica culture, buttermilk culture (may substitute 1/3 cup creme fraiche or regular buttermilk; see headnote)

4 cups heavy cream, preferably not ultra-pasteurized

Kosher salt (optional)

Steps

Combine the culture and 1 tablespoon of the cream in a food processor. Let the culture defrost for a few minutes and then work it into the cream so it's grainy. (If you're using creme fraiche, mix it well with 1/4 cup of the cream.)

Heat the remaining cream to 75 degrees in a saucepan on the stove top (low heat), then add it to the food processor; pulse until well incorporated. Transfer the mixture to a bowl, cover loosely with plastic wrap and let sit for 16 to 24 hours, during which time it will thicken a bit, like creme fraiche or sour cream. Then cover and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.

Just before you return the mixture to the food processor for "churning," heat the chilled mixture to about 55 degrees by seating its bowl in a larger bowl that's filled with warm water, stirring gently all the while; this should only take a few minutes.

Transfer the mixture to the food processor; puree for 5 to 8 minutes, during which time the mixture will thicken further and change color from off-white to pale yellow. (Once it starts to look pebbly, it's almost butter.)

After another minute, the cream will look curdled and suddenly separate into a milky liquid and small curds of yellow butter. Transfer to a fine-mesh strainer and drain the liquid (reserve it, if you wish; some folks use it for baking bread and watering plants). Rinse the mass of butter curds briefly under cool water, to harden them a bit and get rid of further milky residue.

Wrap the butter in a few layers of clean, slightly damp cheesecloth, then place it in a clean bowl or on a non-wooden surface (preferably marble). Knead vigorously with your hands, or slap the hunk of butter against the surface repeatedly until the butter feels creamy and dense, about 3 minutes, stopping to unwrap and work in a little salt, if desired.

The butter can be served right away, or molded or pressed into a shape before you store it.

Nutrition | Per tablespoon: 110 calories, 0 g protein, 0 g carbohydrates, 12 g fat, 7 g saturated fat, 30 mg cholesterol, 0 mg sodium, 0 g dietary fiber, 0 g sugar

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Copeland, Libby. "Our messed-up relationship with food has a long history. It started with butter." Washington Post, 22 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA486607209&it=r&asid=dc41c291778056ecfe2382207bd23531. Accessed 12 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A486607209

"Butter: A Rich History." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA462236482&asid=af07a2f2105c408bc0d8d1f13b39e24b. Accessed 12 May 2017. Stoeger, Melissa. "Khosrova, Elaine. Butter: A Rich History." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 134. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA462044974&asid=ccf0c25cf81817cb63e7478e178c6a16. Accessed 12 May 2017. Copeland, Libby. "Our messed-up relationship with food has a long history. It started with butter." Washington Post, 22 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA486607209&asid=dc41c291778056ecfe2382207bd23531. Accessed 12 May 2017.

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  BOOK REVIEW: Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova

  Elizabeth Cole October 28, 2016 Blog, Book Reviews, Books Leave a comment

  Title: Butter: A Rich History
  Author: Elaine Khosrova
  Publication: November 15, 2016
  Publisher: Algonquin Books
  Genre: Cookbooks, Food and Wine
  Pages: 368

  Butter

  SYNOPSIS: (From Goodreads)

  After traveling across three continents to stalk the modern story of butter, award-winning food writer and former pastry chef Elaine Khosrova serves up a story as rich, textured, and culturally relevant as butter itself.

  From its humble agrarian origins to its present-day artisanal glory, butter has a fascinating story to tell, and Khosrova is the perfect person to tell it. With tales about the ancient butter bogs of Ireland, the pleasure dairies of France, and the sacred butter sculptures of Tibet, Khosrova details butter’s role in history, politics, economics, nutrition, and even spirituality and art. Readers will also find the essential collection of core butter recipes, including beurre manié, croissants, pâte brisée, and the only buttercream frosting anyone will ever need, as well as practical how-tos for making various types of butter at home–or shopping for the best.

  REVIEW:

  **A copy of this book was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.**

  Butter. Everyone loves butter. Butter makes your crab taste better. Helps makes cakes rise. It raises toast from hot bread to crunchy goodness. I saw this book and knew I had to read it. I have on occasion even made my own butter. Whipping it past all the stages until the buttermilk and milk particles separated and it made a satisfying whomping sound on the sides of the metal bowl. But I wanted to know more. After reading this book, now I do.

  The book begins as the author is following some yak farmers in Bhutan out to milk their yaks. Did you know that yak’s butter can make the farmer three times as much money as cow butter? I am going to start raising yaks. The author travels all over the world discovering everything thing she can about butter. The author helps the woman who carves the butter cow at the state fair. Turns out they reuse the butter every year but mix in a slight amount of new. She loves the butter cow so much she has to pay her children to demolish it every year because she can’t handle the thought of doing it herself.

  While on her journey, the author learns that in the Middle Ages people regarded butter with great suspicion to the point where they believed that ingesting butter might make a person more susceptible to catching Leprosy. They also regarded the action of making butter as a symbol of fertility. She finds every culture has its own thoughts on butter. Some very philosophical. Buddhist monks compare the teachings of Buddist soul transformation to how ghee is derived from milk. I don’t think I would have ever have made that connection. The author visits many places that make butter. From commercial butter making factories to small mom and pop’s. The icing on the cake is the bonus recipe book all made with, you guessed it, butter!

  I enjoyed this book. It made me want to get up and bake all sorts of things. You can tell as you are reading it that the author truly has a passion for butter. She made the information interesting without being overly dry or scientific. The only real problem I had was that I am reading what I can only assume is a unproofed copy. There was frequently absent sentences that made reading it somewhat difficult. The book, however, was well written and informative. I will never think of butter the same way and will hold it in much higher esteem.

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  Word count: 1053

  'Butter must be spread in kitchens everywhere,' local author Elaine Khosrova pens best selling book on butter
  Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2016 6:00 am
  By Telly Halkias tchalkias@aol.com

  BENNINGTON - About 10 years ago, when I first met author Elaine Khosrova, she was senior editor at iSante Magazine in Bennington, having been brought in to add her food writing and editing expertise to the nationally recognized wine magazine.

  Perhaps I should have been tapping Khosrova's experience a bit more back then, since recently I've written more food articles than I ever imagined possible. Instead, our conversations centered on the art of writing and great works of literature and their authors.

  So what exactly does this have to do with Khosrova's new release, "Butter: A Rich History"? (Algonquin Books, 2016, 344 pages, $25.95)

  Everything actually. In what is billed as the first book ever to tackle a comprehensive view of butter, Khosrova, who lives with her family in New York's Hudson Valley, delivers a captivating narrative that is informative, entertaining and, for all you kitchen mavens out there, yes, practical.

  In short, Khosrova's love of literature shines through in "Butter." It allows her to write a book about the same stick of fat we all buy at the store, as if it were a bar of gold bullion meant for the dowry of a princess.

  That's not by accident, either. Khosrova, also founding editor of culture, a premier magazine about cheese, stepped down from her position there to research and write this book.

  "As the editor of culture for almost 5 years, I was exposed to dairy lands around the country and world, and the butter that came from them," Khosrova said. "I was intrigued by how different they could be, depending on the three factors that, together, create a butter's character - man, land, and beast."

  As such, Khosrova travelled the world to grasp not just uses and production of butter, but also the many cultural nuances and human stories behind it. And make no mistake, her itinerary was exhaustive: Ireland, France, England, Bhutan, India, Canada, Wisconsin, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and California.

  Khosrova's attention to detail, mixed with a healthy dose of lyricism, grabs you on the first pages when she describes yak milking in Bhutan:

  "The calf, meanwhile, strains against the rope to be with its mother, hungry for more milk. But its mom is indifferent now; she stands placidly as if being milked by Choney is somehow hypnotic. Beneath her thick horns, she gazes east at the ho-rizon. Under a cobalt sky the rounded arcs of land covered in whiskery grass repeat endlessly, endlessly; for the yak, it represents a continuous buffet."

  Regardless of genre, that's world-class descriptive narrative, and the book bubbles with it, even in the recipe section.

  And what a grouping of recipes! After Khosrova takes us around the world and cross-country in the first part of the book, the second part is broken into three sections: "Baked Goods," "Cooked Items," and for the adventurous among us, a number of ways on "How to make your own butter."

  Some of the offerings therein: "Pull-Apart Biscuits," "Shortbread, Unplugged," and a variety of sauces, to include Bernaise and Bechamel.

  Once again, Khosrova wastes no time in making the journey through her collection of recipes an inspired dialogue, yet somehow one that will always seem like a chat between old friends. This can be seen in the opening lines of her first recipe, "Best-Ever Crumb Cake":

  "I don't tend toward hyperbole, so when I call this crumb cake the best ever, you can be darn sure it's outstand-ing. The golden cake is tender and moist, topped by a dense chewy layer of buttery crumb. It's so good that when I was deciding which recipes would make the cut for a quintessential butter collection, this cake suddenly sprang to mind though I'd only eaten it once at a friend's house more than fifteen years ago."

  And when a recipe springs to Khosrova's mind, readers, chefs and all-around kitchen gods and goddesses should take note. That's because the author of "Butter" has also walked the walk from her youngest years.

  "In my own family's kitchen, food was simple but real," Khosrova said. "No TV dinners, no sodas, no fast food. Everything from scratch, including my Dad's great apple pie, and Mom's shortbread. And she was from Scotland."

  Also, before her writing career, while still in her 20's, Khosrova followed her heart and quit her job as a dietician in the New York City Health Department to be a pastry chef, both in the city and the Hamptons.

  Khosrova also holds a BS in food and nutrition, and studied pastry at the Culinary Institute of America. This upbringing and these credentials not only served her well in writing "Butter," but also make this book a must-read, and absolutely-must-have-in-every-kitchen-everywhere.

  "Butter" has rightfully garnered early critical acclaim from experts in the field, as well as marked up some well-deserved strong sales. This has led to a #1 ranking in New Releases on Amazon, as well as a steady climb to the Top 20 lists in several other categories on the online retail giant.

  Also, The Wall Street Journal recently ranked "Butter" #3 on its "10 Books to Read Now" list.

  One would think such success, as well as the proliferation of TV's eccentric star chefs, would have Khosrova doing backflips and breakdancing on NRP or CBS Sunday Morning, two of her recent interview appearances.

  But such is not the case. This is a fine chef in her own kitchen who can also write globally, loves both crafts, and still values the timeless messages in classic literature.

  "I hope [readers] will marvel, even momentarily, that something as common as butter can also be quite extraordinary," Khosrova said. "I suppose the subtext is that there's a lesson in not taking things for granted. As the poet Mary Oliver once said, when she gave three instructions for living: `Pay attention. Be astonished. Go tell about it.' That's what happened for me with `Butter.'"

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  Word count: 1130

  Khosrova uncovers rich, delicious history in new book about butter
  Posted Tuesday, November 15, 2016 6:00 am
  By Lindsey Hollenbaugh, lhollenbaugh@berkshireeagle.com

  Like most of us, Elaine Khosrova took butter for granted.

  Until about nine years ago, then the food writer had what she calls an "aha!" moment.

  "I was working at a restaurant trade magazine and was asked to do a butter tasting," said Khosrova. "At first, I saw it as a chore, tastings were something we did often. But there were a dozen or more butters, and I was really astonished at how different they were. I was not expecting the different colors, textures, flavors and degrees of saltiness. ... It woke me up to pay attention to butter and I became fascinated with the science and craft of butter making."

  That fascination led her on a three-year journey across three continents in search of experiencing the diversity of butter and the art of making it first hand. The Chatham, N.Y.,-based food writer hiked up a mountain in Bhutan to follow a high-altitude herder to milk yaks and then churn it into yak butter - a centuries-old process barely touched by time. In India, she tasted water buffalo butter, a disappearing breed of butter as the water buffalo culture is pushed out by cows.

  Her travels and her scientific findings are compiled in her new book, "Butter: A Rich History" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

  In the book, she describes her visit to a small village in the Punjab region of India to witness the making of water buffalo butter, starting with a thick, frothy fermented milk that is churned using a vigorous pulley method. After a half hour of churning, Khosrova was given a spoonful of the white butter to taste. She writes: "As the butter dissolved on my tongue - into rich waves of creamy, tangy, nutty, buttery flavor - the audience read my pleasure. With nodding heads and smiles, they knew what I had then realized: It was one of the best butters I'd every tasted."

  The book is filled with vibrant passages detailing the intricacies of butter making across the globe, making you think twice about that stick of industrial butter you have sitting in your fridge. Khosrova said she isn't out to take down the industrialization of butter - "more and more there are good butters out there," she said - but to give butter its due spot on the table.

  "Butter results from the meeting of three very dynamic things: Man, land or forage and the animal itself," she said. "These three things change from culture to culture and that makes tremendous variations."

  While she can appreciate the science of it, she said it's easy to see how ancient cultures used butter as a sacramental and ritual tool.

  "It embodied divinity, a mystical power, for them," she said. "It was an enigma how this liquid milk could beautifully turn into pieces of golden butter. It emerged like pearls in oysters and rainbows."

  Butter's historical significance wasn't the only surprise Khosrova churned up in her extensive research. She said she was also shocked by the 90-year-long battle with margarine.

  She hopes to be a butter converter of sorts. The author's favorite use of the golden goodness is in homemade pie crust, or, simply slathered over a slice of warm sourdough bread.

  "In regards to health, I hope I can be yet another voice reversing the terrible stigma that has afflicted butter for 50 years now," she said. For anyone unsure of crossing over to the butter aisle, Khosrova points to recent studies citing health issues stemming from vegetable oils in margarine that are highly processed and highly synthesized.

  Her advice: Eat the butter, but in moderation.

  The book ends with a chapter of recipes, all inspired by, of course, butter.

  "I hope people will recognize that common things can extraordinary stories," she said. "It was a big, ironic lesson for me: I had spent so much time chasing exotic food stories, but here, right under my nose this whole time, was this epic story."

  Yellow Buttermilk Layer Cake

  Courtesy of Elaine Khosrova

  Makes one two-layer 9-inch cake

  Ingredients:

  1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

  1 1/4 cups sugar

  3 large eggs warmed in bowl of hot (not boiling) water

  2 tsp vanilla extract or 1 tsp almond extract

  2 1/4 cups cake flour

  1 1/2 tsp baking powder

  1/2 tsp baking soda

  1/2 tsp salt

  1 cup buttermilk, warmed to room temperature

  2 cups of your favorite frosting

  Directions:

  Butter the bottom of two 9-inch baking pans and line with parchment paper; butter and lightly flour the insides, sides and bottoms.

  Heat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until creamy and light, about 4-6 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well with each addition. Beat in the vanilla.

  In a medium bowl, sift together cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Beat one-third of the flour mixture into the butter mixture, then beat in half of the buttermilk. Scrape down the sides then beat in half of the remaining flour mixture then all of the remaining buttermilk. Scrape down sides then finally beat in the remaining flour mixture until a smooth, thick batter forms.

  Divide and spread the batter equally between pans. Rap the pans to force any air bubbles to the surface. Bake for 22 to 25 minutes. Cool the cakes 10-15 minutes in their pans then cool completely on a rack before assembling and frosting.

  Fun facts

  - Did you know?

  Butter can be made from more than just a dairy cow's milk. Throughout history butter has also been made from the milk of sheep, goats, water buffalo, yak, horses, camels and reindeer.

  - When you shop

  While it's "pretty impossible" to pick just one favorite butter for Khosrova, she recommends cultured, French butters with the AOC label. If you're shopping in a regular supermarket, industrial butter is OK, she said, just go for high fat, sometimes labeld "European style."

  - Butter basics

  Buy butter that is well packaged (foil wrappers or small sealed tubs are best). Once you get home, keep it in the fridge away from other ingredients with odors. Khosrova recommends storing it in the back of the fridge. Freezing butter is OK, she said, but fresh is best.

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  Word count: 263

  Elaine Khosrova’s history of butter will attract those tired of scrimping on life

  After decades of suspicion and denigration, the high-fat ingredient is undergoing something of a renaissance, and Khosrova’s book is part of this change in attitudes

  18 Feb 2017

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  Butter: A Rich History
  by Elaine Khosrova
  Algonquin Books

  Most of us will remember when butter took a beating and margarine triumphed as the heart-healthy alternative. But as opinion turns full circle, high-fat pleasures are stoking appetites again. Which is why Elaine Khosrova’s book on everything buttery might attract an audience tired of scrimping on flavour. A former pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America, she explores butter’s history, from Neolithic times to the 21st century, when slow movement artisanal varieties continue to increase in number. Exact dates are debated, she writes, but the first batch was probably created by accident – possibly in a pouch of milk left overnight, then put on the back of a pack animal that jiggled it into being. We learn of butter’s different uses around the world, including in spiritual practice (Tibetan monks consider butter sculpting esteemed work); how it used to be sold by the yard in 19th-century England; why Napoleon III is to blame for encouraging the creation of butter’s doppelganger, “oleomargarine”; and that Julia Child was butter’s best publicist for decades. Khosrova includes instructions on how to make butter at home; even handier is an appendix of her favourite brands.

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  16 December 2016 04:55PM
  Enid Futterman
  Elaine Khosrova's BUTTER: A rich read
  by Enid Futterman
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  www.workman.com/authors/elaine-khosrova

  Elaine Khosrova is a good example of the kind of food writer who writes with her senses. if you love butter as much as I do, I dare you to read “Butter, a Rich History” without a couple of slices of good bread slathered with good butter. (For the bread, I suggest Bartlett House, Bonfiglio & Bread, or Made in Ghent; for the butter, we lack a local entry. The growing number of small family dairy farms that pasture cows can sell raw milk, but no other raw dairy. Ridiculous, but it is what it is until it isn’t, which will happen. In the meantime, I suggest Kerrygold or Anchor. )

  Khosrova loves butter too, and has spent years mining the depths of the subject from here to Kazahkstan. and from butter’s pre-historic origins to here now. (Margarine almost knocked butter out in a half-century battle, but heart disease skyrocketed as butter consumption plummeted. The cards were stacked with bad science, and butter has been rightfully redeemed.)

  Butter is, in fact, not bad for your health or your girth. On the contrary. The dietary cholesterol theory of heart disease, and the low-fat diet for losing weight have been debunked, and butter is again seen for what it has always been—a nourishing, in fact essential food, for its high quantity and quality of CLA (good fat) and fat-soluble, crucial vitamins A, D and K.

  And if you also thought butter was butter, Khosrova will debunk that for you too. There are as many colors, textures, tastes, and smells as there are butters, and she names names. She gives butter the nuances of wine, and chocolate, affected by and infused with the nature of the pasture, the animal, and the method of butter-making. It takes over two hundred pages plus recipes and more to tell the whole story, but she can distill the whole process down to six words: Anatomy meets botany to rearrange chemistry.

  Maybe the most interesting aspect of Khosrova’s research and writing is the respect bordering on reverence for the mythical, even metaphysical qualities ascribed to butter and practiced in rituals throughout history and around the world. Which doesn’t surprise me; there is something magical about the transformation of milk into butter. For centuries, it couldn’t be explained, but women could make it happen. Sometimes, that looked like witchcraft of the wicked kind, but it gave women an outsize role in butter-making until the late 19th century.

  Khosrova provides a shortlist of the best butters; some readily available, some not. She has hinted that Bimi’s Cheese in Chatham, where she lives, will be carrying one of her favorites. But the best butter she ever tasted is inaccessible to all but the butter-obsessed—a water buffalo butter made in a tiny village in India. Such are her persuasive powers that she made me think, for a minute or two, that I would go there someday.

  It’s a feast of a book and Khosrova will sign one for you at Talbott & Arding, 323 Warren Street, Hudson, tomorrow from 2 to 3:30. You can get good bread and butter there too.

  PHOTOS
  1 Book cover
  2 At Khosrova’s Chatham Bookstore reading in Supersoul Yoga

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  Butter's rich history: 5 things you might not know
  The Thread
  Tracy Mumford · Nov 22, 2016
  Farmer's wife churning butter. Emmet County, Iowa
  Farmer's wife churning butter in Emmet County, Iowa, 1936. "Butter and people go back a really, really long way," writes Elaine Khosrova, the author of a new book all about the dairy staple. Russell Lee | Library of Congress

  "Butter's history is our history," Elaine Khosrova writes in her new book, "Butter."
  'Butter' by Elaine Khosrova
  'Butter' by Elaine Khosrova Courtesy of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  It's an ancient creation and a modern delicacy, a diet staple and a cultural artifact; it has played a role in the economic, religious and culinary development of the world as we know it.

  And it's delicious.

  Khosrova's new book dives into the development of butter, from ancient Irish bogs to sacred Tibetan butter sculptures to a massive dairy in Wisconsin that churns out 42,000 pounds of butter an hour. "Butter" not only gives the history of the ubiquitous ingredient, but also provides recipes to make your very own at home. ("It's child's play!" Khosrova said.)

  As you're spreading, melting and whipping butter this holiday season, churn up some conversation with these butter tidbits from the book.

  Butter's rich history

  1) Butter has been around for 9,000 years

  "Butter and people go back a really, really long way. It's been with us for at least 9,000 years," Khosrova said.

  It likely began as an accident: some chilled milk shaken around in a sack on the back of an animal on a bumpy trail. But it quickly became a staple for people who lived near herds of ruminants — cows, goats, sheep, reindeer, camels, water buffalo.

  One of the closest glimpses we have of ancient butter is bog butter — butter that was preserved in Ireland's wetlands. Some of the samples that have been discovered date as far back as 400 B.C.

  2) Butter was once churned by dogs on a treadmill

  Modern butter-making is a technological marvel — but there were a few steps between churning at home and the massive, motor-powered operations we know today.

  One such invention involved harnessing "a dog, sheep, or horse to a treadmill, which in turn powered the churn," Khosrova writes.

  3) Butter and margarine were bitter enemies

  If there's a battle in your home over butter and margarine, that's fitting. Margarine got its start thanks to dreams of world domination: We have Napoleon to thank for butter's dairy(ish) doppelganger.

  Facing a critical butter shortage and a potential war with Prussia, the military leader issued a cash prize in 1869 for anyone who could create a "cheap, plentiful butter substitute" to feed soldiers and the lower class, Khosrova writes.

  Chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries rose to the challenge, crafting a combination of beef fat, milk and salt into the first margarine spread. The recipe has shifted from beef to veggie oils over time, so Khosrova isn't quite sure exactly the original tasted — but it was definitely salty.

  The spread was a hit in the United States, but American butter makers instantly identified it was a threat.

  "They launched a very fierce political campaign in federal and state courthouses to basically drive the margarine producers out of business using registration, legislation, taxation — all these different political tactics," Khosrova explained.

  In fact, to keep the masses from forsaking butter forever, butter makers persuaded some state legislatures to decree that margarine could not be dyed yellow — to avoid confusion, they said. Some legislatures went even further: They ordered margarine to be dyed a completely different color: pink, red or even black. Mmmm.

  Butter makers would have gotten their way and won the war, had it not been for another actual war: World War II. Between the Great Depression and World War II, there was a massive butter shortage, and the cheaper, long-lasting margarine could no longer be suppressed.

  Margarine dominated America's kitchen tables for decades after, but today, Khosrova noted, "finally butter sales are outpacing margarine sales."

  4) Butter played a role in mummification

  Butter had all sorts of ancient uses that Khosrova dug up in her research, but perhaps the most unexpected was the Egyptians' use of butter for the afterlife.

  "The Egyptians used to make a paste of butter and dirt and sawdust, and use it to plump the skin of their mummies," she said. "Sort of like an ancient Botox treatment."

  5) Taking butter out of the American diet didn't make us healthier

  "What emerged in the mid-20th century was essentially a very simplistic theory that we have fat in our arteries, so it must be coming from the fat in our diet," Khosrova explained. "People bought into it because, intuitively, it made sense, but now we know it's so much more complicated."

  Because of this theory, butter became a target for low-fat and no-fat diets. It was cut out of recipes and labeled unhealthy. But the numbers didn't add up, Khosrova notes.

  Throughout the 20th century, butter consumption dropped dramatically.

  "People were eating 17 pounds of butter a year in the 1920s, and it dropped to about four and a half pounds by the end of the century," she said. "Meanwhile, heart disease was rising constantly. The fact that butter was blacklisted really never made any sense."

  Make your own: Sweet Cream Butter

  Butter sculpture
  Erin Daninger, 20, checks the condition of the butter sculpture that is stored in a freezer on the family farm in Forest Lake, Minn., in August 2012. Daninger's likeness was carved in butter after she was named one of 12 finalists for the Princess Kay of the Milky Way competition at the Minnesota State Fair. Jeffrey Thompson | MPR News file 2012

  This recipe comes from "Butter: A Rich History," by Elaine Khosrova, c 2016 by Elaine Khosrova. Reprinted by Permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved.

  Industrial dairy producers have perfected the science of making sweet cream butter by the ton. They truck superfresh cream to a butter plant, pasteurize it, let it temper, then load it into continuous automated churns. Minutes later, out comes the pale golden spread — sweet, smooth, and mild.

  Given the freshness and availability of supermarket butter, it might seem pointless to make your own. (It will rarely save you money.)

  But there are good reasons to do it, beyond just the DIY satisfaction. Churning your own sweet butter allows you to make it higher in butterfat and lower in water than the commercial brands. And since a higher butterfat version — say, between 82% and 86% — is not just more unctuous and buttery but is also better for baking and cooking, it's worth keeping some on hand.

  Second, if you have access to really good cream — say from pastured Jersey or Guernsey cows — your homemade butter will be more flavorful, contain more healthy CLAs, and have a gorgeous yellow color. If you're able to source raw cream from a local dairy farm that sells reliably safe raw milk, all the better. But in most states, raw cream is illegal to sell. Most likely you'll be using pasteurized cream, so try to find a brand that's not ultrapasteurized and is free of additives. Some so-called whipping creams have stabilizers added. Ideally you want an ingredient label that simply reads "cream."

  As for equipment, anything that allows you to beat the cream will work, whether it's a jar with a tight-fitting lid that you shake, a bowl and whisk, an electric stand mixer, or a food processor.

  Avid butter makers contend that it's better to spin or concuss the cream end over end rather than beat it with paddles or blades. The former method is said to be gentler on the fat molecules and makes for a better-textured butter. In my (humble) experience, churning with a food processor creates a spreadable, well-textured butter, but the important thing is not to overbeat the butter once it has formed.

  One final point worth mentioning, since it's often confusing to new butter makers: the buttermilk that's left over from sweet cream butter making is not true buttermilk — a cultured dairy liquid with a tangy taste. Traditional buttermilk is the by-product of cultured butter making, whereas most buttermilk sold in supermarkets is actually low-fat milk that's been cultured with lactic acid bacteria. The milky byproduct of sweet cream butter is bland and not tangy, somewhat like skim milk, but without the protein content.

  Sweet Cream Butter

  Makes about 3/4 pound butter

  • 1 quart (4 cups) heavy cream (preferably not ultrapasteurized), at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit
  • Salt (optional)

  1) Pour the cream into a large spotlessly clean bowl, jar, or the container of a food processor. If using a stand mixer, fit it with the whisk attachment.

  It's important when churning with a closed container, such as a jar, classic paddle churn, or food processor, that you leave as much headspace for air as you have volume of cream. The air is essential for getting the cream to whip its way to becoming butter.

  2) Beat, paddle, process, or shake the cream to bring it to the whipped stage. Continue agitating the cream so it thickens further and then changes color from off-white to pale yellow; this will take at least 5 to 10 minutes, depending on your equipment.

  When it starts to look pebbly, it's almost butter. (If using a stand mixer, you want to stop beating and drape a tent of plastic wrap over the bowl to enclose the whisk and top of the bowl so the ensuing liquid won't splash out.)

  3) After another minute the cream will look curdled and then suddenly it will separate into opaque whitish liquid (so-called buttermilk) and small curds of yellow butter. Transfer the mixture to a fine-mesh strainer and drain off the liquid. Rinse the mass of butter curds with cold water briefly to harden them a bit and chase off any milky residue.

  4) The final step is to briefly knead, or "work," the butter, which will drive off more of the liquid and make your butter more cohesive and smooth. The traditional way to work butter is with small wooden paddles, known as butterhands. Not many folks have butterhands these days (though you can get them online), so there are other ways to work butter.

  It's best to avoid using your bare hands since your warm touch can spoil the texture of the butter, causing it to melt in spots. Instead, wrap the butter mass in a clean damp muslin cloth, or a few layers of cheesecloth, and then knead it with your hands inside a large bowl or on a cool, clean surface, such as marble. The cloth will absorb the excess moisture and be a barrier for your hands.

  Alternatively, if you're using a stand mixer, use the paddle attachment — on the lowest speed — to mix the mass of butter, draining the excess liquid that seeps out. One caveat: Don't knead the butter on a used wooden cutting board or surface, which generally has some lingering food odors. The butter will pick them up like a magnet.

  5) Knead until the texture is dense and creamy — usually no more than 3 minutes — blending in coarse salt or fine salt as desired. A little salt goes a long way in butter, so add it carefully, tasting it as you blend. On average, a stick (1/4 pound) of commercial salted butter contains 1/4 teaspoon fine salt, so this 3/4-pound batch would have triple that amount by that standard. But it's your butter, so add as much or little salt as you like!

  6) Your butter is ready to serve as-is. But it can also be molded, pressed, or shaped using a butter mold.

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