Memories of

Posted Oct 8, 2002

If I think hard, I can remember the first butter I ever tasted.

What comes to mind first is the day, on the joyful side of autumn, with a warm sun and a sky as glowing blue as only a ten-year-old can see.

I remember walking across the campus of Murray State College on the way from the Training School to my grandmother's house. I remember backlit leaves above my head, yellow and orange. I remember mowed lawns studded with bushes and benches, and curving sidewalk as incandescent grey as the sky was blue, and ROTC boys drilling with their serious faces and solemn blue uniforms. Maybe not that very day, but some day on the same stretch of campus.

If I think harder, I remember thinking, "Is that all?" of my first taste of the real thing. "Is that what all the fuss was about?"

Unsalted, undyed butter: it tasted thin and foreign. Something from another world, another age. I could hardly wait to tell Granny and Uncle Orin we'd made butter at school that day. They'd remember when it was all we had. To me, it was a conversation piece, not a food.

We'd shaken cream in a mayonnaise jar, each child taking a turn until the butter formed. I don't really remember what it looked like. I don't even remember whether all the cream turned to butter, or if it left some liquid in the process.

Years later, when I went antiquing, I remember I saw jars containing blades you turned by a crank. I smiled in appreciation upon hearing that they were butter churns, and felt a stab of smug self-satisfaction to be able to say, "I've made that."

I didn't get a taste for the stuff until I was in Jr. High. My family had gone on a vacation to the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada. There, in an inn built of the native grey rock, within earshot of the ocean waves rolling onto a rocky beach (that's not a beach, I'd thought upon seeing it for the first time. A beach has sand!) I had my first taste of homemade bread hot from the oven, slathered in real butter that melted into the tender holes of the crusty slice.

I'd never seen anything like that bread, so far removed from the "balloon bread" that I was used to and disparaged. "The staff of life?" I'd wondered when I first heard the phrase. "This gunk?" Now I held the staff of life in my hand and crowning it with butter was almost a religious experience.

For years when I got out on my own I only bought butter. We crave the foods that were hard for our ancestors to obtain, and finding them easily, I've overindulged. I've switched to olive oil as my main fat now, for my health, and I've learned to savor its almost equally ancient pleasures too. But real butter's still a special treat.

I wonder about that teacher, decades ago. I'm sure I disappointed her with my distaste for that day's class project. Was it enough for her to have taught us a dollop of hands-on history? Or did she know in her heart that the seed of appreciation was planted and, given time, it would grow?

By Ruby Jung, even the background. All rights reserved to the story. If you care for the background, you're welcome to copy it and use it.