Over a recent meal at Forest & Marcy, the little sister restaurant to John and Sandy Wyer’s Forest Avenue near Dublin’s Grand Canal, there were so many morsels to get excited about. Toasted quinoa crackers – something that sound terribly dull – were transformed into tantalising titbits by Chef Ciaran Sweeney, and there was real theatre in the presentation of their salmon smoking away in a wooden box, smoked to order. A house-cured charcuterie board featured a super pickled fruit relish, and charred onion bread that packed a crunch.
Even with all that marvellous complexity being offered up, one of the flavours that has remained with me since the meal was in a simple little pot of the kitchen’s matured butter.
This rich little pot of almost-turned butter reminded me of the yumminess of butter, churned by hand from high quality milk or cream. In his poem Churning Day, Seamus Heaney calls butter "coagulated sunlight… heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl".
It’s fair to say that Ireland is famed for its golden and flavourful butter, particularly with our American cousins. Many of our cows eat lovely green grass, healthy from our abundant rain showers, and produce great milk because of it. Our connection with butter has been a long and prosperous one. In the 1860s, the largest butter market in the world was in Cork City.
The Butter Exchange in Shandon exported butter as far as India, South American and Australia. Today, you can find out about the history of the market in The Butter Museum, located next door to the old butter market, where they hold butter making demonstrations every Tuesday and Thursday at noon.
But humans were making butter way before the 1800s. Earlier this summer, turf cutter Jack Conway found a 10kg lump of bog butter in the Emlagh bog in Co Meath. This preserved butter is thought to be 2,000 years old, and apparently it smells like very stinky cheese. Some historians believe that the bog butter may have been offerings to pagan gods with a hope of prosperity being granted in return.
It's believed that the earliest butter would have been made from goat or sheep's milk, as these animals were domesticated long before cattle. The goat was "probably the first animal after the dog to be domesticated, between 8,000 and 9,000 BCE in present-day Iran and Iraq," writes Harold McGee in his fascinating tome, originally published in 1984 and revised in 2004, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
Butter gets shout-outs in The Bible, and the Roman author and philosopher Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) talks about butter being “held as the most delicate of food among barbarous nations”, indicating that butter-making was well established in northern European countries by Pliny’s time.
So, how do you make butter? Have you ever whipped cream a bit too much, so that it curdled? Yeah, me too. You may have binned your lumpy cream in a baker’s huff, but you were in fact taking your first steps along the road to making butter.
Imen McDonnell is an American cookbook author, blogger and food stylist who married an Irish dairy farmer from Limerick. Her cookbook, The Farmette Cookbook: Recipes and Adventures from My Life on an Irish Farm features a lengthy section on homemade dairy products, including a couple of methods for making your own butter.
You might not have access to the same fresh milk as she does, living on a dairy farm, but it’s possible to source high quality cream from small, trusted farms. Make a point to seek cream out at your local farmer’s market. The better the cream, the better your butter.
Making your own butter might not be something you do everyday, but I like how McGee describes its value.
“These days, if a cook actually manages to make butter in the kitchen, it’s most likely a disaster: a cream dish has been mishandled and the fat separates from the other ingredients. That’s a shame: all cooks should relax now and then and intentionally overwhip some cream! The coming of butter is an everyday miracle.”
