Whipped, plugged and drizzled with honey: why Britain is in love with butter again

The signature dish of Holm, a trendy and hyper-seasonal restaurant in Somerset, is not Cornish place or local cobnuts. It's the butter.

"We whip ours in a KitchenAid until it's like meringue," says Holm's founder and chef, Nicholas Balfe. "We do this for two reasons: it makes it light, so you can put more of it on your bread. And two, so you can just slip your bread into 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 – but maybe not the way you think. On TikTok, butter boards — collective platters of softened butter drizzled with honey, sprinkled with salt, or sprinkled with edible flowers — have made flavored butter the new cheese boards. /p>

In restaurants like Holm and London's St John, butter is whipped, browned or flavored, and is regularly written on the menu.Even in the cultural world, butter has been elevated to the rank of art.Egyptian-born artist Laila Gohar transforms butter into forms ranging from the bizarre to the wondrous. them, flowers and Michelangelo's David with chicken.

This fall, two cookbooks with a needle- the emphasis 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 lawyer-turned-cookie writer, goes one step further. "Every recipe has butter in the title," she says. "I would describe my culinary relationship with butter as a wake-up call, and I wanted to draw attention to it rather than bury 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 historic Mediterranean diet of her 1990s childhood.

This diet, which suggested eating olive oil instead of butter, along with fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains, to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes and reduce chronic disease, has turned butter into a 'no go zone'. We were afraid of it”. In a neat role reversal, Waitrose recently launched smoked butter for pasta.

For Jonathan Woolway, chef director of St John, a restaurant that has made butter a written on its menus for over 15 years, it has never gone away: "Butter is a no-brainer for the table."

In The New Yorker's seminal essay by Anthony Bourdain, he describes how chefs put away "almost a stick of butter at every meal".

Balfe buys its cultured butter from the Longman Dairy in Yeovil because it's "relatively small-scale, they have their own herd of Friesian cows and they care about herding", but chooses unsalted Yeo Valley for its own fridge "because of the children". interest reflects a broader shift in cooking, from something "finick and French to something more stripped down".

"Bread and butter" It's become something nostalgic and heartwarming, maybe because of what we're going through financially, but also because it's a meal in itself and affordable,” he says.

"At home and in restaurants, people are more proud of their bread now, so it would be silly not to spend so much time and energy on butter." It's just an extension of what happened to, say, sourdough.

Potts agrees. "Whether you're buying raw unpasteurized butter, you can taste where it comes from, the terroir, but even adding ingredients or just sprinkling salt on it has made it a bigger thing." She, too, thinks butter has its "sourdough moment". .dotcomrendering .pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement" class="dcr-1mfia18"/>

This sudden interest in butter is helped by its rarity. Supply chain issues and inflation have made butter more valuable in this cost of living crisis, with prices in the EU rising 80% this summer and