More butter

Butter, like milk, is one of the earliest foodstuffs to enter anyone's consciousness.

"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"

wrote A A Milne.

Laura Ingalls Wilder describes her mother's strawberry mould into which the butter would go; apparently, it was white in winter, but "Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty" so she would add carrot juice to turn it yellow. Curious.

I also remember a marvellous book called the Giant Jam Sandwich in which a town was plagued with wasps and eventually the citizens made a gigantic jam sandwich, using spades to spread the butter and jam and eventually trapping the wasps in the middle of the sandwich by dropping the second slice on to it. Splat!

Butter, of course, has many different consistencies. How is one expected to spread it when it comes straight from the fridge? To scrape little chunks off and placing them strategically around the slice of bread is so unsatisfactory and contrary to the principle in How Green was my valley that butter should always be spread "tidily". Putting it in the microwave never quite works: unless one is very very careful, it ends with the butter seeping into a pool.