30 SAVEUR.COM
THE SPLURGE
to be of the uncultured, or the “sweet
cream,” variety.
Some brands tout fat content as
the key to quality and print it promi-
nently on their labels. In the U.S.,
federal regulations require butter to
be at least 80 percent fat, a level some
insist is too low. But to my surprise,
several expensive high-fat butters
tasted bland and oily. “As you ramp
up fat content, you squeeze out more
milk solids,” explained Aaron Foster,
owner of the Brooklyn specialty food
shop Foster Sundry. “The fat itself is
relatively mild, so you get richness at
the expense of flavor.”
Then there is the dilemma of salt-
ing. There are partisans on both sides;
a lack of consensus exists even among
the butter illuminati. Diane St. Clair
doesn’t make a salted variety. “I believe
that the flavor shines through better
without salt,” she said. Grant Har-
rington of Ampersand Butter Culture
in Oxfordshire, who furnishes some of
London’s top restaurants, considers
the pink Himalayan salt he uses to be
essentia l. I happen to side w ith St. Cla ir.
Maybe it’s only because the bureau-
crats in charge of the Soviet Union’s
food production didn’t believe in salt-
ing butter, but what palate isn’t shaped
by personal history?
I’d learned about Harrington online;
butter nerds in the UK plotzed over
his product. According to them, the
soap-opera-handsome former chef,
who toiled under Gordon Ramsay,
practices his dark art while listening
to the Wu Tang Clan. His butter isn’t
available in the U.S., but Harrington
ag reed to mail me an unsa lted sample
of his work. Some friends I roped into
tasting it grew quiet and nodded soul-
fully—the stuff was stupendously rich,
with unexpected briny notes of iodine
and oysters. Harring ton attributes the
deep yellow color to the Jersey cows
that produce the cream he uses. Jerseys
give less milk than the more popular
Holsteins—the black-and-white cows
of children’s books—but theirs is richer
and darker because of the way they pro-
cess the carotene in grass. This, my
friends’ faces seemed to say, was butter.
Harrington believes the key to
a great butter lies in extreme cul tur -
ing. “By fermenting the cream with a
specific lactic bacteria that produces ablend of butyric acid and diacetyl—fla-
vors our brains associate with butter— I
aim to make it taste as buttery as pos-
sible,” he said. He sources the bacteria
from a lab in Scandinavia and ferments
his cream for nearly a week.
At this point, I knew it was time to
revisit Bordier. My beseeching e-mails
and calls to Brittany went unheeded. I
heard that an acquaintance had smug-
gled some home from France, but he
sounded about as eager to share it as
to volunteer for a root canal. And so
it came to pass that a fellow butter
zealot who works in this magazine’s
test kitchen knew someone helpful in
Paris. A huge FedEx bill later, the air-
lift was complete.
I’m happy to report that the diminu-
tive brick in the plain paper wrapper
tasted as breathtaking as I remem-
bered—a vast array of f lavors and
aromas blended into a seamless
whole in the manner of a well-aged
burgundy. After churning, Bordier’s
butter is kneaded in a 19th-century
metal-and-teak contraption called
a malaxeur (massager); this unusual
extra step is the reason for its mouth-
feel, as silky as foie gras. And then
there’s Bordier’s uncommon balance
of elegance and richness. No wonderButter loves...
RADISH LEAVES
Delicately spicy radish leaves
allow the most royal of the fats
to reign supreme. Spread but-
ter over herbed crackers or thin
slices of baguette, sprinkle with
flaky sea salt, and crown with a
fresh, de-stemmed springy leaf.WHEAT BREAD
Nutty whole wheat breads bring
out a premium butter’s sweet
flavors and creamy mouthfeel.
Choose a fresh-baked loaf with
a crusty brown exterior and a
soft, fluffy crumb. Crunchy nuts
and salty seeds are a plus.MAPLE SYRUP
Butter loves sugar, but rarely
does it meet the maple variety
outside of pancakes and
waffles. Biscuits, toast, yeasty
rolls, and sweet potatoes pro-
vide further occasion.the French phrase for making a pros-
perous living is faire son beurre.
By this time I’d spent too long in
butter’s thrall, and thinking about it
passively at home was no longer an
option. I’d read rapturous reports about
St. Clair’s butter but never tasted it. And
so while the White Mountains blazed
crimson and gold in mid October, I
raced up Route 91 to see her.
After I met the 11 buff Jerseys grazing
behind her 19th-century farmhouse, it
became clear that for her they were not
livestock but pets, or possibly oversize
children. While talking in St. Clair’s
living room, which looks out onto
her pasture, she fixed one cow with a
worried stare. Her husband, Alan, a
large-animal veterinarian, sat beside
her. “Does she look upset to you?”
St. Clair asked him.
Her butter was the most intense I’d
tasted. It had a consistency reminiscent
of great vanilla ice cream and a long,
worrying finish. Like many artists,
behind a nonchalant façade St. Clair
happens to be competitive and proud,
and alongside her butter she brought
out a stick from a well-known Vermont
creamer y. Comparatively, it tasted like
a votive candle. “There’s no secret
technique to doing this,” she said. She
believes that a good butter is noth-
ing more or less than a reflection of its
time and place, “a seasona l product that
proudly proclaims where it was made.”
Butter churned in spring—when cows
graze on new grass—has the deepest
color and flavor. In autumn the cows
consume hay as well as grass, making
for a muted but richer product.
“I wanted to ma ke a butter as close as
I could get to what was produced before
the advent of the modern creamery
in the early 1900s,” St. Clair told me.
Though she affected the unflappable
manner of a New England farmer, her
eyes shone when she spoke about but-
ter, a substance she’s called “the elixir
of the human race.” I asked whether for
her butter was an obsession.
“Milking every single day, twice a
day?” she answered. “And when I’m not
milking I’m separating, pasteurizing,
churning, bottling buttermilk, moving
fences, feeding cows, and making hay?
I’d say it’s an obsession or insanity.” She
paused for a moment, and then asked,
“Is there a difference?”