I’ve never understood margarine. I do know what it is, I just don’t understand how it came to be accepted as food you would feed to yourself or someone else. Friends of mine remember when it came as a lumpy white mass with a red capsule in the center. The idea was to mash the red dye into the fatty stuff, massaging it so that the result was an orange-ish color something like real butter.
By the time I started doing most of the grocery shopping, they had solved the yellowing problem and there was little else advertised or on the market shelf. Just various variations on fake butter, butter-like sticks made with milk-like derivatives, spreads with lovely names like “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” (I can’t believe it’s not lard, said my former business partner, a witty man). The real stuff was relegated to a small shelf corner, if available at all.
I understand the economic rationale. Margarine is cheap to make, doesn’t easily spoil, can be made with a variety of oils and processes, can sit on shelves longer, and is a great profit generator for factories that produce food and ad agencies that make happy-kitchen commercials. I just don’t understand why someone would prefer something fake when the real thing it’s trying to imitate is sitting right next to it.
Though I have vague memories of butter that my grandmother made from cows she milked herself, on Guernsey this past summer I had a taste of absolutely transcendent butter. Guernsey butter is a deep, yellowish orange (and not from red dye out of a New Jersey chemical plant but from the diet of the cows). It is rich, deeply flavored, extraordinarily itself, and it makes everything it touches taste better. Like a fresh egg from a local hen, or the crust for a fruit tart, or just spread on a piece of good bread.
Good butter has been part of diets for thousands of years. Exchanging it for a chemical facsimile makes no sense.