Butter is Better for Baking and Cooking

My grandmother, in her beloved grassland, who taught me only ever to bake with butter

Of course, lately we are learning about all kinds of fats and their issues. It can get very confusing. In all the to-ing and fro-ing about the relative benefits of butter versus margarine and the issues associated with trans fats, the one comment by someone involved in the food industry stuck in my mind. He said that if our ancestors have been eating it for millenia, then we know our bodies can absorb it.

Obviously, as in all things, moderation is the key - after all, fat used to be a luxury and rarity (no wonder we like it so much!) As a child, I only ever was partial to butter, and my kids too are growing up on butter, olive oil, all the good things in life. Life’s short, after all, and I console myself with the fact that our ancestors ate it millenia ago, it simply can't be all bad (provided it is eaten in moderation and combined with a healthy, exercise-filled life, of course). 

As far as biscuits and cookies and cakes go, essentially this means we eat what we bake or make ourselves; we seldom buy and eat store-bought cakes, etc. Sweets are a rare treat, though I have stooped to bribing with small pieces of chocolates to practise the piano. It used to be hard to go shopping, generally I’d allow each one a small treat up to a certain amount of money, but as they have gotten older, eating healthily has become an ingrained habit, and there is less wailing in the shop. However, after two I’ve grown accustomed to the mayhem and relatively oblivious to other shoppers. 

While I have never contemplated using anything else but butter in any baking, I also strongly advocate that you cook eggs and pancakes in too – since one of the secrets to them is to ensure the pan is not too hot. Since butter burns when it’s too hot, then frying your eggs in butter is one way of ensuring you don’t overcook them and they come out soft and white with a runny yellow and delicious – and, of course, it is equally essential that your eggs are at room temperature to begin with, but I do get them freshly laid on the day from happy free-range chickens and use them within the week. 

The way my grandmother taught me to cook eggs, or pancakes, is laborious and time-consuming, since you are obliged to undertake the cooking in relay style while others scoff merrily around you, and of course the rivalry between Conall and Faran as to who gets the first pancake (though the second is usually nicer) can be a bit tedious, especially first thing in the morning. But my grandmother, Jess, always stood at the stove and served eggs hot from the pan and I am not one to go agin her teaching regardless of the extra work entailed. 

Omelette, lightly fried in butter and not overcooked

But while eggs were possibly Grandma's signature dish, she was a baker of note and a large component of that had to do with her using butter only and always. They lived without electricity or potable water, water came initally from a small spring and later on a borehole, so life was difficult enough for her that anything that she went out of her way to do “the harder way” just had to be essential. She would keep the butter in a perfect state of spreading readiness by leaving it on top of the gas fridge, warm enough in the air to soften while the cold of the fridge-top beneath it spread into the silver dish to maintain it at what is called room temperature, but which in hot countries isn’t really room temperature at all – not in summer at least. 

All baking, and especially that beaten by hand, as grandma’s was, due to the lack of electricity at the farm, must be undertaken with “room temperature” butter (the concept of room temperature, as with wine, should be related to a specific temperature (in the case of butter, between 18 C or 65F) rather than a vague concept of a room – which in the old days would be a cool room in which the dairy items were kept anyway – but more about that in the NY Times article on Butter.

Grandma wasn’t often angry, but she became extremely irritated, almost resentful, if she discovered some well-meaning soul had put the butter in the fridge and it had become hard at just the time she was about to embark upon a cake, the ingredients out and the oven temperature just right. The culprit was invariably a visitor who had thought to help, not knowing grandma’s needs in this regard. She’d never tell them off directly, but she’d cluck her tongue and contort her face when the hard butter was discovered, and sometimes, resentfully, dig her thumb into the hard butter, daring or willing it to soften up quicker (for the record, this literal "rule of thumb" is particularly good for ascertaining if the butter is at the requisite 18C so the old ways prove themselves useful and reliable). If the butter was too hard, she was then obliged to cut the butter up small and put it in a pan in hot water, but that technique doesn’t really work very well since bits of the butter melt, so you had this delicate problem of trying to get the butter warm, but not too warm. But since the oven was made hot by burning wood and coal, sometimes it was what she had to undertake, albeit begrudgingly. 

I must admit to often placing the butter back into the fridge, or even the freezer for a short while (and find the stainless steel bowl of the Kenwood invaluable in this regard in that it spreads both heat and coolness fantastically fast and evenly), to ensure the butter is at the perfect temperature (and if I can just obtain a thermometer my son does not break, I'm sure things will go even more swimmingly).

As to butter's deleterious effects on your weight, well, this is the story I have to offer. At our community group, we were fortunate enough to have Ilaria persuade some of the superb bakers in our community come and demonstrate for us. Celine, being French, makes everything, as the Americans would put it, from scratch. It is always a study in contrasts for us in this multi-cultural community – you have Celine and Mathilde, both French, who have come and given baking demonstrations, and then Maya, who is Lebanese – all of them are superb cooks and bakers. But, invariably, someone from the audience, who was generally not small, would remark in astonishment on the amount of sugar in a cake (like if they don’t see it in a cake mix or make the cake from scratch, it’s not there) and query as to whether there is a low-fat substitute for the butter used. Every time, the response is exactly the same. These very slim, healthy women wrinkle up their noses, literally, in a mixture of puzzlement, almost distaste, at the question. Celine, whose training is as a thermodynamics engineer, was the most succinct, she just said, “No.” When Ilaria, our Italian consecutive translator turned full-time mother and great organiser, asked her to clarify her response, for the sake of our audience, Celine gave an engineer’s reply, again with a French shrug of the shoulders, “There is no substitute,” she clarified. And went back to beating her mixture. Maya laughed and said, “I’m a full-fat girl myself,” and then added, “It’s for the taste, you know - it does taste better.” Mathilde simply said, “If you want to watch your weight, don’t bake a cake.” And yet all of them are absolutely rigorous when it comes to no Trans-fats, healthy fruit and vegetables and so on – the kind that read all the labels in the rare event that they buy processed food, since generally they just always make their own. 

So, if you want to bake biscuits or cakes, bake them by all means, bake them from scratch, bake them as a treat and not daily and, particularly if you want your cookies to be flaky or melt in your mouth, use butter - I dare you!