Last week, Kelsey McKinney went to a Butter Party.
The Butter Party was not some 300-year-old Philadelphia tradition that's never broken contain, but an event organized by Margaret Eby, Deputy Food Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who was determined to use the wisdom of crowds to pick a Butter Champion. We at Defector were all very jealous of Kelsey's invite, and we ended up with butter on our brains for an extended period of time. Here are all of our favorite ways to use butter:
Mashed Potatoes
A common take is that most foods on the classic Thanksgiving plate are only useful as gravy delivery systems. I will not stand for mashed potatoes being maligned in this fashion.
Is this because I hold some amount of reverence for the humble spud? I do not. The potato is not a food to sing about. My position comes down to the fact that people who say mashed potatoes are only there to get more gravy into your mouth have fallen prey to a misunderstanding. It is butter that the mashed potatoes are there to serve.
Think of what makes a baked potato a bearable meal: the amount of butter and other toppings you can manage to jam into it. And yet there still remains a fundamental issue, because the physical properties of a baked potato make it so that the butter and toppings do not survive your first few excavations of the potato's insides. What results is a displeasingly unbalanced eating experience. The first few bites are a delightful blend of buttery potato and other fixings; the rest are plain, boring potato guts.
Mashed potatoes solve this issue. Simply place a pad of butter on top of a pile of hot mashed potatoes, wait for it to melt, whisk the potatoes around a bit with your fork, and there you have it: the perfect combination of butter and potato, served for as many bites as you can stand.
-Tom Ley
On A Beautiful Crusty Slice Of Bread
I am a salted butter elitist. I think butter should have flavor all on its own. And while I appreciate the normal butter in noodles or inside a cookie, the way I really want to eat butter at the end of the day is softened, littered with Maldon crystals, and spread on a warm piece of bread. The crunch of the crust with the soft give of the butter and insides of the bread is a treat. It is better than 90 percent of the small plates at trendy restaurants right now, and it's almost always what I want to open my meal. I love it!
-Kelsey McKinney
Hamburger Buns
Yes, I could be talking about the Culver’s ButterBurger, and I kind of am, but I am primarily thinking about a snack at home. Sometimes, if I have leftover hamburger buns, I will put them in the toaster, spread butter on them, cover that butter with seasoning (cajun or Montreal, usually), and eat both halves of the bun together like an empty sandwich. It is warm, zesty, and buttery. What more could I want?
-Lauren Theisen
Ghee On Indian Food
Technically the first place I’m putting the butter—a staggering volume of butter, to clarify—is into a medium-hot pan. It melts and froths up and the water cooks out, and if you lean over this decadent steam bath you must be diligent not to drool into it. In a few minutes the milk solids form, and those deep brown bits and bobs can be strained out, leaving just ghee, cleaner and sweeter and suddenly nutty and shelf-stable. I like to spoon out the ghee, fling it onto a hot chapati, tilt it, and watch the oil slick run down its black-blistered topography. Or I'll take an idli and rub some ghee along its spongy surface as if applying sunscreen, watching it seep into the pores, ensuring every future bite is full of holy fat.
-Giri Nathan
Blue Crab
As a spread, I like butter best on warm whole-wheat toast. But I love it most in melted form, as a condiment for blue crabs, the best of all things to eat.
-Albert Burneko
Cornbread
I don't eat cornbread often, but there is nothing more sublime than a hot pan of fresh cornbread from a cast iron skillet with a dab of salted butter melted on top. The graininess of the cornmeal is a crucial texture for the butter to do its thing. Also, cornbread is the perfect amount of sweet to be complemented by butter. Cornbread on its own is good. Cornbread with melted butter is elite.
-Alex Sujong Laughlin
Nothing!
I prefer butter in things, not on them. Mix in a comical amount to make any recipe taste like a restaurant dish, fine—my qualms here are absolutely not health-related. But I do not crave butter to be spread or melted on the outside of anything. Pancakes are for syrup. Toast is for jams, jellies, things of that nature. And when I do think a dish will be improved by the external application of some sort of creamy, yielding milkfat—well, why settle for butter when cheese exists?
-Barry Petchesky
Butter Is A Symbol Of Western Imperialism
I once knew this kid who, in elementary school, would eat those packets of butter that they leave out for toast, bagels, things of that nature. This was, if not morally repellent, physically repellent to me, seeing as I never cared for butter or cheese or, really, much dairy at all. Giri asked me if this was because I was secretly lactose intolerant, but my slight lactose intolerance is no secret to me. It's of low enough severity that it is a choice, rather than a genuine impediment.
Don't get me wrong: Much like avocados, butter—and dairy products in general—can be good, especially if it doesn't taste like what it actually is. But the great Dairy Lobby successfully petitioned schools to teach you that you had to eat, like, six portions of dairy a day to stay healthy. People out there are seriously obsessed with cheese! And slathering things in butter! Back when Buzzfeed was making those aesthetic top-down videos of quick recipes, every single one featured roughly one pound of butter and/or a full block of cream cheese. Disgusting. So in high school, I came to a conclusion: Cheese* is a symbol of Western Imperialism. This sentiment has now been expanded to include butter.
Is this belief based in any sort of research? Great question! No.
-Kathryn Xu
*some exceptions apply
Scallops
Dinner means a great deal to me. It's not just because it’s an easy top-three meal, although it’s in there easily, but because the time my wife and I spend making and eating dinner marks both the end of our work and the first time we really get to talk most days. It is also time aimed exclusively at doing something nice for ourselves—making stuff we want to eat as well as we can do it, according to various brisk, ridiculous (“have you checked to see if the chicories are still good? And what kind of radishes do we have, because ...”) conversations over the course of the week. I eat breakfast because I get a headache if I don’t, and I eat lunch when I can, which puts kind of a lot of pressure on dinner to be both a fitting end to another damn day and deserving of all that anticipation.
I use butter in basically every bit of dinner cooking, generally in ways that have been fine-tuned or just leveled off in methods that work well enough for us—a tablespoon with some lemon juice to finish a clam broth, in a janky meunière-adjacent sauce for spooning over flounder or the like. For more or less the same reasons that Alan Arkin’s character in Little Miss Sunshine got into heroin in his golden years, I foresee myself using more and more butter in these preparations as we get older. I don’t imagine I’ll ever get to the amounts that actual restaurants use, but I am also grateful not to know how much that is. Still, I hope to live long enough to taste the lemon-caper-shallot-butter sauce I’ll be making in my seventies.
The one preview I afford myself of that future decadence that I promise myself in the present involves scallops. They are delicious, but they are a luxury food. We get our seafood at the greenmarkets near us and pay whatever premium is involved there, but I don’t remember the last time I paid less than $24 a pound for them. We fit this in the budget by giving them a smaller part of the plate than we usually do proteins, and saving them for either special occasions or periods that feel lousy or exhausting enough to warrant recklessly enscalloping a weeknight. We have been in The Scallop Zone for like five straight years, in that sense, but they’re expensive enough that we don’t push it.
Recently, we gave ourselves permission and did the thing. What we ate was this tomato salad, and some corn, and some scallops done in the way that I do them, which is too simple to warrant a recipe. What you do is get some sea scallops, preferably from Warren but honestly wherever you can get them, and then, if they are the size of the ones I got, you cook them for three minutes or less in a hot pan with some oil in it. Turn them over and leave them like that for maybe 30 seconds, and then turn the heat off and throw some butter and a few thyme sprigs in there. Tilt the pan and spoon that browning butter off the seared tops of the scallops until you start worrying that they might be over, at which point you put them on a plate and put some of the butter over the top.
If you do it right, which you probably will because they are a very easy thing to cook, you will wind up with something that looks and tastes really fancy. You might think, as you carry them to table, that you really “aced this shit.” You might really have. But it’s the butter that makes it taste and feel like someone who’s a better cook than you made it. I know this, but it’s a fun thing to forget on a Monday night.
-David Roth
