The signature dish at Holm, a hip and hyperseasonal restaurant in Somerset, is not the Cornish pollack or local cobnuts. It’s the butter.
“We whip ours in a KitchenAid until it becomes like meringue,” says Holm’s founder and chef, Nicholas Balfe. “We do this for two reasons: it makes it light, which gives you licence to put more on your bread. And two, so you can just swipe your bread through it. Butter has become more than [just butter] – it’s a dip, a condiment and a standalone ingredient.”
In restaurants, on shelves and even on social media, butter is back – though perhaps not in the way you think. On TikTok, butter boards – communal trays of softened butter drizzled with honey, sprinkled with salt or even scattered with edible flowers – have turned flavoured butter into the new cheese boards.
In restaurants such as Holm and London’s St John, butter comes whipped, browned or flavoured, and is routinely written on the menu. Even in the cultural world, butter has been elevated to an art form. The Egyptian-born artist Laila Gohar turns butter into shapes that range from weird to wonderful, from flowers and Michelangelo’s David to chicken.
This autumn, two cookery books with a needle-sharp focus on this ingredient – both are simply called Butter – were published by TV chef James Martin and food writer Olivia Potts.
Martin’s book describes butter as “the king of ingredients”. Potts, a barrister turned cookery writer, goes one step further. “Every recipe has butter in the title,” she says. “I’d describe my cooking relationship with butter as an awakening, and I wanted to draw attention to it rather than burying it in the ingredients.”
Potts, who buys salted butter from Ocado, says she was compelled to write the book as a reaction to “the tyranny of olive oil” that accompanied the landmark Mediterranean diet of her 1990s childhood.
This diet, which proposed eating olive oil over butter, along with fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains, to lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes and decrease chronic disease, turned butter into a “no-go area. We became afraid of it”. In a neat role reversal, Waitrose has recently launched a stir-through smoked butter for pasta.
For Jonathan Woolway, chef director of St John, a restaurant that has made butter a written feature on its menus for more than 15 years, it never went away: “Butter is a matter of course for the table.”
In Anthony Bourdain’s seminal New Yorker essay, he describes how chefs put away “almost a stick of butter with every meal”.
Balfe buys his cultured butter from Longman dairy in Yeovil because it’s “relatively small-scale, they have their own herd of Friesian cows and they care about animal husbandry”, but chooses unsalted Yeo Valley for his own fridge “because of the kids”. He thinks this renewed interest reflects a wider shift in cooking, from something “finickity and French to something more stripped back”.
“Bread and butter has become something nostalgic and comforting, maybe because of what we’re going through financially, but also because it’s a meal in itself, and an affordable one,” he says.
“At home and in restaurants people take more pride in their bread now, so it would be silly not to put the same time and energy into butter. It’s simply an extension of what’s happened to, say, sourdough.”
Potts agrees. “Whether you buy raw butter that’s unpasteurised you can taste where it’s from, the terroir, but even adding ingredients or just sprinkling salt has made it more of a thing.” She too thinks butter is having its “sourdough moment”.
This sudden interest in butter is helped by its scarcity. Supply chain issues and inflation have made butter more precious in this cost of living crisis, with prices in the EU going up 80% this summer and supermarkets security tagging pricier versions.
Food writer Rebecca May Johnson buys Morrisons’ own brand Brittany butter with salt, but has noticed a spike in price and drop in availability. “The value range from which I buy unsalted butter for cooking has increased the most in price, really shockingly so. It’s also often not available – when we see it we buy a few and put some in the freezer” she says. “What was a basic grocery has become a luxury”.
