Letter 2: On French Butter
My goodness, you’re still here? What a lovely surprise, though I suppose I should quiet down before you click away to something more interesting.
When determining the route to take for today’s dispatch, I reached for my compass, only to realize, whoops, I had no compass and would have to flail about for a subject, eventually landing upon… French butter. Why not? I told you this newsletter could go anywhere.
French butter is perhaps too precise a term for what could be more broadly categorized as European butter, but it was in France that I discovered this delight.
The setting: a Paris apartment, the proper size they have in Europe where an apartment is not a stepping stone to buying a house but an actual home in which you can build a life and raise a family. A formal dining room, sitting room, soaring ceilings, hardwood floors warmed by time, and imposing windows overlooking the streets of the 18th arrondissement.
Just as wonderful as the bones of the apartment were its contents. Bookshelves ran throughout, shelves lined with the identical white spines of Gallimard Folio editions. Walls were adorned with collages my host had created from bits of posters she had thieved from the metro.
Each morning, my host would prepare breakfast for me, part of which would change from day to day (a fried egg one morning, some hard cheese the next), but the one constant was a little basket into which she had neatly tucked an assortment of bread and pastries. A veritable cornucopia of French carbs. Divine.
As I sat that first morning at the breakfast table, naively buttering a slice of bread, not yet comprehending that it, as gorgeous as French baking is, was merely a vehicle for the real star.
That first taste. Pure velvet. The texture luxurious, like yards of sumptuous fabric folding upon themselves. The flavour deep and rich and creamy but also punctuated by the slight tang of something alive.
I raved to my host about my revelatory experience mediated via her breakfast foods and her reaction was both amused and slightly perplexed, as though I must have been raised on a diet of Fisher Price plastic fruit.
The disparity of just a few percentage points between the fat content of European and North American butter marked a world of difference. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I now understood the true nature of what I had been eating back at home: waxy in texture and bearing the hollow taste of the inside of a refrigerator. The former was a food unto itself, the latter a mere lubricant to keep the bite of toast from sticking to your throat.
From then on, I smeared it thickly onto my bread, not the transparent layer I would apply in North America, where the butter disappeared into the toast as the knife scraped roughly across its surface, but a barrier so substantial that the knife and the toast never made direct contact. Heaven forbid they meet again.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.