Butter

• 1. Introduction

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  Butter is a dairy product so woven into daily life that Fernand Point, one of the great French chefs, reportedly demanded it with the cry: "Donnez-moi du beurre, encore du beurre, toujours du beurre!" Give me butter, more butter, still more butter. In 2022, the world produced six million tonnes of it from cow milk alone. Yet butter is far older than any recipe, any restaurant, or any nation-state. A Sumerian tablet dating to approximately 2,500 B.C. describes the butter-making process step by step, from the milking of cattle. Other tablets from the same era record butter as a ritual offering to the gods.

  What exactly is butter, and how did something so ancient become so universal? Why did the ancient Greeks consider it barbaric food while medieval peasants and French pastry chefs came to prize it above almost everything else? And what happens when you stop making it from milk altogether? This documentary follows butter from a Neolithic discovery through the peat bogs of Ireland, the factory floors of 19th-century America, and into a laboratory where it is being made from carbon dioxide pulled out of the air.

• 2. What Butter Actually Is

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  At room temperature, butter is a semi-solid emulsion of approximately 81% butterfat. It holds that form only within a narrow range: refrigerator temperatures keep it firmly solid, but at 32 to 35 degrees Celsius it melts to a thin liquid. Its density is 911 grams per liter, and its color ranges from deep yellow to nearly white depending on the source animal's feed and genetics.

  Unhomogenized milk and cream carry butterfat in microscopic globules, each surrounded by membranes of phospholipids and proteins that stop the fat from pooling. Churning damages those membranes, allowing the fat globules to merge and separate from the rest of the cream. The watery liquid left behind is buttermilk. Once drained, the fat grains are "worked" by pressing and kneading, traditionally using wooden boards called scotch hands, until they consolidate into a solid mass with any remaining pockets of water broken into tiny droplets.

  The finished product contains fat in three distinct forms: free butterfat, butterfat crystals, and undamaged fat globules. The ratio of these forms determines texture. Butters with many crystals are harder than those dominated by free fats. Commercial butter typically runs about 80% butterfat and 15% water, while traditionally-made butter can have as little as 65% fat and as much as 30% water. Rendering butter by removing its water and milk solids produces clarified butter, which is almost entirely pure butterfat. Ghee is a further step: the butter is heated to around 120 degrees Celsius after the water evaporates, browning the milk solids and producing antioxidants that allow ghee to be stored for six to eight months under normal conditions.

• 3. A Word From Ancient Roots

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  The English word "butter" travels a long road back through the Germanic languages to the Latin butyrum, which itself is a latinisation of the Greek bouturon. That Greek word may be a compound of bous, meaning ox or cow, and turos, meaning cheese: essentially "cow-cheese." The word turos is attested in Mycenaean Greek, placing it among the oldest recoverable layers of the language. The latinised form survives in the scientific name butyric acid, the compound responsible for the sharp smell of rancid butter and other fermented dairy products.

  A play by the Greek comic poet Anaxandrides uses the term boutyrophagoi, meaning "butter-eaters," as a label for Thracians. The word was clearly an insult. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, calls butter "the most delicate of food among barbarous nations" before cataloguing its supposed medicinal properties. The physician Galen, writing later, also treated butter strictly as medicine. For the Mediterranean world, where olive oil was plentiful, butter was at best a curiosity and at worst a marker of uncivilized people living on the northern margins.

• 4. From Peasant Food to Prized Ingredient

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  Scandinavia has the oldest documented tradition of butter export in Europe, stretching back at least to the 12th century. In the cooler climates of northern Europe, where butter did not spoil as rapidly as it did under Mediterranean sun, the product found a ready market. After the fall of Rome and through much of the Middle Ages, butter fed most of Europe, but it carried a low reputation and was consumed mainly by peasants.

  The shift came slowly. The Roman Catholic Church's decision in the early 16th century to permit butter during Lent gave it a form of institutional respectability. The Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral stands as a literal monument to that moment: it was erected in the early 16th century after Archbishop Georges d'Amboise authorized the burning of butter during Lent in place of scarce oil. Bread and butter became standard fare among the middle class, and the English developed a reputation for pouring melted butter over meat and vegetables.

  In northern Europe, a very different preservation strategy developed: burial. Butter was packed into barrels called firkins and submerged in peat bogs, sometimes for years. The cool, airless, antiseptic, and acidic environment of a peat bog slowed spoilage dramatically while the fat aged into a strong, distinctive flavor. Firkins of bog butter are a common archaeological find in Ireland. The National Museum of Ireland has examples containing what has been described as "a grayish cheese-like substance, partially hardened, not much like butter, and quite free from putrefaction." The practice peaked in Ireland between the 11th and 14th centuries and had ended entirely before the 19th century.

• 5. Industrialization and the Modern Stick

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  Until the 19th century, nearly all butter was made by hand on farms, pressed with carved wooden molds that identified the producer, and sold at nearby markets. The first butter factories in the United States appeared in the early 1860s, following the successful introduction of cheese factories a decade earlier. In the late 1870s, the centrifugal cream separator arrived, marketed most successfully by Swedish engineer Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval, and it transformed the speed and scale of production.

  Refrigeration and the mechanical milk separator also made sweet cream butter practical to produce at scale. Sweet cream butter, made from fresh rather than fermented cream, can be produced in as little as 6 hours; the older cultured method can take up to 72 hours. The resulting division is still visible on grocery shelves today: cultured butter dominates continental Europe, while sweet cream butter is the standard in the United States and the United Kingdom.

  Packaging followed its own trajectory. The use of individually wrapped butter pats in cardboard boxes became common from the 1960s. The refrigeration of ships, introduced around 1882, allowed wooden boxes to replace earlier bulk containers, with preferred woods including sycamore, kahikatea, hoop pine, maple, and spruce, selected because their resins would not taint the butter. In the United States, the practice of packaging butter in 4-ounce rectangular sticks is generally traced to 1907, when Swift and Company adopted it for mass distribution. Even today, the shape of those sticks differs east and west of the Rocky Mountains. East of the mountains, the dominant form is the Elgin shape, named for a dairy in Elgin, Illinois. West of the mountains, a shorter, wider configuration prevails.

  Colorants became part of commercial production in the late 19th century, when producers started adding dyes to achieve a consistent yellow appearance, particularly in winter when cattle feed naturally produced less pigment. Annatto is among the colorants used by U.S. butter manufacturers, and notably it may be added without being declared on the label, since U.S. regulations allow an undisclosed flavorless natural coloring agent in butter, an exception that does not apply to any other food sold in the country. In 1920, Otto Hunziker published The Butter Industry, Prepared for Factory, School and Laboratory, a text that went through three editions by 1940 and helped establish international standards for detecting and resolving defects including tallowiness, mottles, and acidity.

• 6. Butter in the Kitchen

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  Butter has been considered indispensable in French cuisine since the 17th century. Julia Child put it plainly: "With enough butter, anything is good."

  In sauce-making, melted butter takes on a range of characters depending on heat. Beurre noisette cooks until the milk solids and sugars turn golden; beurre noir takes them to dark brown. Both are commonly finished with vinegar or lemon juice. Hollandaise and bearnaise sauces emulsify egg yolk with melted butter, and while egg yolks provide the main stabilizing power, butter itself contains enough emulsifiers from the remnants of fat globule membranes to hold an emulsion on its own. Beurre blanc is whisked into reduced vinegar or wine to form a sauce with the texture of thick cream. The technique of "mounting" a sauce involves whisking cold butter into any water-based preparation at the end of cooking, adding body and a glossy finish.

  For frying, plain butter burns at 150 degrees Celsius, a relatively low threshold that limits its use as a cooking fat for high-heat applications. Clarified butter and ghee, with a smoke point around 200 degrees Celsius, handle higher temperatures more reliably. In baking, butter serves multiple structural roles simultaneously: it enables chemical leavening, tenderizes proteins, and enhances the flavors of other ingredients. French butter's reputation in pastry rests on specific factors: an 82% butterfat minimum (compared to 80% in the U.S.), grass-fed sourcing, and culturing. Chef Jansen Chan, director of pastry operations at the International Culinary Center in Manhattan, has said that dairy quality in France and most of Europe is simply higher than in most of the United States, and that this difference accounts for why French pastry has a reputation for being richer and flakier.

• 7. Health, Alternatives, and What Comes Next

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  Nutritionally, 100 grams of salted butter supplies 717 calories, delivers 76% of the daily value for vitamin A, and contains 215 milligrams of cholesterol. Its fat profile breaks down to 51 grams of saturated fat, 21 grams of monounsaturated fat, and 3 grams each of polyunsaturated and trans fats per 100 grams. Because butter is essentially pure milk fat, it contains only traces of lactose, making moderate consumption unlikely to cause symptoms in lactose-intolerant people, though those with milk allergies may still need to avoid it.

  A meta-analysis and systematic review published in 2016 found relatively small or insignificant overall associations between a daily intake of 14 grams of butter and mortality or cardiovascular disease. The study stated that its findings "do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or decreasing butter consumption." A 2015 study took a more targeted position, concluding that people with elevated cholesterol should keep butter to a minimum while moderate intake may be acceptable for those without that condition.

  Butter consumption in western nations declined across much of the 20th century, driven by the rise of margarine, which is cheaper and was long perceived as healthier. In the United States, margarine consumption overtook butter in the 1950s. Now a different kind of alternative has appeared: a company called Savor is producing a fat synthesized not from any plant or animal but from carbon dioxide, methane, and water, converting those inputs into fats and oils. Savor's CEO Kathleen Alexander has described the goal as butter made without any animal or farmland. Whether the Sumerian tablet-writers of 2,500 B.C. would recognize it is another question entirely.