Today’s Prompt #27: Butter
Butter was something that separated me from the rest of America, made me alien in restaurants, in the school cafeteria, in the homes of friends. Plenty of people had larger causes to feel alienated in the mid-1960s: religion, sexuality, and race. Butter was such a small disconnect you might think it insignificant.
My family used unsalted butter. I loved the simple pleasure of bread and butter as much as any dessert. The butter in restaurants was always salted and I found it as brackish as seawater on the tongue. The rolls would be tempting, but I would have nothing to put on them until the meal was served. Eggs in a diner I learned to order with dry toast or I would only be able to stomach the unbuttered crusts.
The butter at my friends’ houses, when it was indeed butter and not margarine, also was salted, and frequently put on sandwiches as a condiment. Even a peanut butter sandwich made by someone’s mother might be slathered with it. With the pickiness of a 10-year-old, I would peel the offending half of the sandwich off and eat the other. Then I’d surreptitiously throw away a perfectly good slice of Wonder Bread.
At 14, my mother took me to Europe for the first time and Continental Breakfast was a revelation. The coffee was divine, the bread perfection, and the butter sweet. Europeans don’t salt butter. I felt at home and welcome because they shared my taste. I could approach prepared food with confidence rather than trepidation. And even though the French “sandwich jambon’ buttered the ham baguette, I simply ate each half as its own dish, the ham and then the buttery half for dessert.
Some years later I had dinner with a friend at the Kennedy Center cafe seeing Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theater. I liked the cafe there because it was one of the few places that served unsalted butter with the rolls. We sat down and the waiter brought a bread basket. We dove in, buttering the freshly baked rolls and taking a bite. My friend got a strange look on her face and leaned in to say that the butter had gone bad. I was surprised. Mine tasted fine. So I sampled the pat on her plate and it also tasted fine to me. Then a light bulb went off and I told her to use the salt shaker. She looked at me like I was playing her for a fool, but I told her to just try it. She salted her butter with a warning look at me but the minute she tasted it, her face cleared. She’d never had the unsalted before.
The world has changed enough that eating differently from everybody else is probably no longer such a divider. And I will eat butter, salted or unsalted, imagining them as two entirely different spreads. But given a choice, the sweet will always be my preference.
