Take some rich milk, skim off the cream, shake it around for five minutes or so and you have butter. It’s one of our natural foods and it has made a big comeback in recent years. Butter is not a modern invention. It has been a human staple for nearly 10,000 years. And it may have shaped history more than you think.
The earliest biblical mention of milk and milk products can be found in the book of Genesis chapter 18, vs. 7. There it says Abraham treated three male visitors to a kind of pancake, butter or cheese curds, milk and roast veal from a fat calf that was butchered for the occasion.
The milk was probably quite fatty — from a beef cow. It says Abraham ran out to the herd and chose a fat calf and told a servant to hurry and butcher it.
Drawings in both the Sahara Desert dating back to 6,000 BC and Babylonia temples dating back to 3,000 BC depict dairy cattle, milk containers and strainers. Biblical, Sanskrit, early Egyptian, Greek and Roman writings all mention milk and dairy products.
Hindu writings dating 2,000 BC to 3,000 BC also mention milk and dairy products.
Some researchers believe that races who included milk and milk products in their diets were stronger and lived longer than those who subsisted on cereals, roots and fruits. The Viking pirates that plundered and pillaged from the 8th to10th Century supported this theory. They were known for carrying large quantities of butter with them.
Cooler temperatures in northern Europe allowed butter to be kept longer before spoiling. Scandinavian has the longest history in Europe of a butter export trade, dating at least to the 12th century. Across most of Europe after the fall of Rome and through much of the Middle Ages, butter was a common food, but one with a low reputation. It was consumed mostly by peasants. It slowly became more acceptable by the upper class, especially when, in the early 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church finally permitted its consumption during Lent. Bread and butter became common fare among the new middle class, and the English, in particular, gained a reputation for their liberal use of melted butter as a sauce for meats and vegetables.
Across northern Europe –Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and Scandinavian -– butter was sometimes treated in a manner unheard of today. It was packed into barrels (firkin) and buried in peat bogs, perhaps for years. Such “bog butter” would develop a strong flavour as it aged, but remain edible, in large part because of the unique cool, airless, antiseptic and acidic environment of a peat bog.
Firkins of such buried butter are a common archeological find in Ireland. The Irish National Museum has some containing “a grayish cheese-like substance, partially hardened, not like the butter we know” on display. The practice was most common in Ireland in the 11th to 14th centuries.
Today, and in recent years, India produces and consumes more butter than any other nation. Yes, India. The country is also the world leader in milk production as well as in milk and butter consumption. Only a small share of produced commodity is exported since the county has a large domestic market.
Last on the list of the top10 butter producing countries is Canada. Canada, with its strict marketing board, can’t supply the domestic market and has to import millions of pounds of butter to satisfy the bakeries and consumers. In 2015, 8.8 million pounds of butter was imported.
