The role of butter in our lives has produced both joy and anxiety. One of my early memories is sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, on the first floor of her two-flat apartment building, and having her spoon feed me pure butter. Pure bliss! A favorite children's book of ours was Anne Rose's How Does a Tsar Eat Potatoes? We loved the imagery of one of the ways: They build a wall of butter and shoot the potatoes from a cannon through the wall of butter into the tsar's mouth. Another Russia story, presumably apocryphal: we were told in the 1970s that the Soviet Union kept a five-year supply of butter frozen somewhere in the Ural Mountains, a national fats reserve.
We were victimized once by our own butter shortage. One Christmas Day, when all the grocery stores were closed, we ran out of butter (probably for the Yorkshire pudding). A desperate foraging among gas station convenience stores finally saved us, but I have always insisted on having at least a pound of butter to spare, "just in case," in our refrigerator. And at least three for Christmas Day.
Given this history, I was particularly tickled by the advertisement we've now seen twice in the local cinemas:
Yesterday, when I was shopping at Waitrose, I saw a young man reach for a package of frozen lasagna, and I wanted to say, "Young man, try an omelet instead." I said nothing, of course, but put two, not one, packages of Lurpak butter in my cart.
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