I cannot believe that, of all things, I’m actually writing about butter. But that’s what the last few years have done to my mind. And yet, soft butter is clearly underrated and one of the best things in life. And in the last year, my mind has been blown away by a new soft butter discovery. Well, it’s new to me.
My whole life I’ve been irritated and occasionally pissed off by hard butter. Because that’s what I encountered nearly everywhere I went that served butter, including my own own home. Ya ever been in a really fancy restaurant like… oh I don’t know… Applebees or something… and you’d get these little brick hard pats of butter in their wrappers? But you can’t use that thing like it is or it’ll destroy the bread. So what do you do? You resort to sitting on the thing for 5 or 10 minutes to soften it up. (Nothing says Applebees like sitting on your food before you eat it.)
For some reason, we Americans have always liked to over-refrigerate everything, just because we can. Half of Americans won’t even take life-saving measures to prevent themselves dying from a horrible, painful virus, but they’ll be damned if their butter is out of the refrigerator for more than 5 seconds, lest they come down with some form of Communist dairy palsy.
So I just assumed my entire life was going to be subjected to overly hard butter.
Then, one day, something that looked very much like this thing showed up at the front door.
Another weird looking thing that Jodi ordered online one day.
And just as Jesus used to say to his disciples, I turned to Jodi and said, ”What in the fresh hell is this?”
”It’s a French butter dish.”
“Huh?”
So she explained it to me, and then said, “I just thought we might try it.”
Well, it turns out that the French butter dish just might be one of my favorite inventions of all time, right up there with toilets that don’t leak (if one exists) and the NFL Red Zone channel.
So here’s how it works…
You buy butter at the store, and in one side of the dish you pat in the butter, just packing it down. And their in the other side, you just put a little bit of water. Like this…
Then you take the side with the butter and plop it inside the other part, so it’s like this…
And this of course is where disaster strikes for the first 2 months that you use the thing. Because your pandemic brain tells you that the side with the butter is the bottom, and the side that you forgot had water is the top. And then you end up with water all over yourself and the counter. And swearing ensues.
But once your brain gets used to picking up the butter side first, it’s fantastic. This keeps the butter fresh for like… 40 years. Ok, maybe a month or so. I’m not sure.
All I know is that it works incredibly well, and now we have soft butter allllllll the time, not just after we sit on it.
Of course this invention has been around for a really, really long time. So there are all kinds of designs for French butter dishes.
Like this one, with bees on it…
Or this one, with a couple of butter Communists on it…
Or this one, with secret Communist writing on it…
Will French butter dishes really turn you into a Communist?
Of course they will.
But it’s definitely worth it because you will always be able to butter your bread with soft damn butter, in peace and harmony, for the rest of your life.