I Can’t Believe this is Butter

Why does butter taste so good in England, but not in Italy?

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

I wrote once before about how food tastes different in other countries (link here), but one of the things I didn’t expect was how differently butter tastes from one country to the next.

Living in the US, I was used to butter that was creamy and rich with a good, well buttery flavour. It was something that could be enjoyed on a slice of toast or a baked potato and really didn’t need much else. When I was a kid and food wasn’t nearly so processed, we had milk delivered straight from the dairy. Early every morning the milkman would drop off a wire rack filled with glass bottles of milk. He also delivered butter, cream, and cottage cheese. Through the year, the milk and butter would taste different, sometimes having a grassy flavour. It was something we were used to, but I forgot about it when local dairies no longer delivered milk and we started buying it in waxed cartons in supermarkets.

When I moved to England, dairy products were much the same, except the butter was fresher again. Because the country was smaller than any of the states I lived in, the milk and butter didn’t go through as many distribution centres. If I went to the cheese shop at the bottom of my street, I could get butter and milk pretty much straight from the dairy over the next hill. In travelling around Britain, I could see cattle happily wandering in large pastures contentedly eating grass all year round.

In the 90’s Irish butter became all the rage in the US, but really English, and I expect butter from anywhere in Great Britain would be as good. The catch was that compared to butter from Wisconsin or Minnesota, the flavour of the butter was pretty close.

It was when I bought butter in Italy, that I noticed a big change.

Butter in Italy was flavourless.

It’s no wonder that butter in Northern Italy was primarily used for cooking. If anyone wanted a spread, lard was preferred. And if you haven’t tried it, cured lard seasoned with rosemary and garlic is creamy and wonderful. It doesn’t taste at all like pork fat, and isn’t oily. I can only say that it is delicious and an underrated food worth trying.

But back to butter. In Italy if people want flavourful dairy products, they buy milk and butter from Germany. Irish butter is also available.

But why the difference?

The clue was when I visited the farm where my father grew up. There was a beautiful brick barn with cows lying in the cool shade on a hot summer’s day. The barn was near the house and the well where the family used to draw all their water. The barn was also surrounded by vineyards, espaliered fruit trees, and cornfields. Unlike the Midwest of the US and Northern Europe, there was no green grass for the cows to graze on. The summers are hot and dry, and any grass dies off quickly after June. Also, growing space is at a premium, so there really isn’t room for grazing cattle. Instead, the cows are fed on hay and silage.

What a cow eats makes a big difference in the taste of the milk, and the butter.

All this dawned on me when I was talking to my nephew about how butter tasted so lousy in Italy. He said that it’s the way butter is here. If I wanted good tasting butter, I’d have to get the imported stuff.

Then I thought about my father’s farm, the green hills of England, and it all clicked.

Now that I am in Northern Cyprus, I notice that it is the same as in Italy. It is hot here in the summer and there’s no land available for grazing cattle. They are also fed on hay and processed food. The butter doesn’t taste that good either. Some brands add artificial flavour, making it taste like the strange butter that comes on popcorn in US movie theatres. But for the most part the butter is bland.

Irish butter is also popular here.

It turns out that butter from grass fed cattle has a higher fat content and is more nutrient rich. It contains beta carotene, vitamin A, in additions to more omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and less saturated fat than butter from grain fed cows.[1] The beta carotene gives butter its natural buttery-yellow colour. The natural oils make it smoother and easier to spread[2]

Of course, flavour is subjective and someone who grew up eating butter from grain fed cows might find butter from grass fed cows too intense, or just not right. For me, it tastes right, neither bland nor having the over the top, intense artificial butter flavouring.

The important thing is knowing how the environment affects the food we eat. It’s too easy to think of butter or other foods as something that comes in a package, something with a brand. And the taste of the product is associated with the brand rather than the conditions that created the food. Knowing what a cow eats, or the time of year can affect the flavour of something as ubiquitous as butter takes us a step beyond the brand and makes us think about where our food comes from. The flavour of butter can connect us to the environment, and also connect us to our memories of what we feel it should taste like.

[1] https://www.maplehill.com/post/why-we-love-grass-fed-butter

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejlt.201400469

[2] https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition/grass-fed-butter-vs-regular-butter-whats-the-difference/