19 February: Butter Festival

Today in Buddhist Tibet, there is a Butter Festival involving elaborate sculptures of yak butter, butter lamps turning paper prayer wheels, puppet shows, etc. Afterwards, the butter is left to the Crows.

1. In the west, we mostly eat butter made from Cow's Milk, but cows are not the only, and certainly not the first, creatures whose milk has been used to make butter. Goats, sheep, yaks, Camels, Reindeer, Horses and water buffalo can also produce butter.
2. Butter is one of those foods which gets bad press as one of the most unhealthy foods you can eat, which is why Margarine has been so popular since the 1950s. Butter may not be as bad as you think. It has vitamins in it - A, D, E, and K. Butter made from grass-fed cows' milk also has CLAs, Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids. About 30 percent of the fat in butter is mono-unsaturated fat, the same fat as in Olive oil.
3. Butter is usually about 16-18% Water, and if salted, the Salt content is about 2.5%. Salt was first added to butter to help preserve it.
4. It takes 21 pints of milk to make a pound of butter. It's made by agitating un-homogenised milk. This works because the milk contains microscopic globules of butterfat surrounded by membranes made from fat and protein. The membranes stop the fat from pooling together, but shaking up the milk breaks the membranes so the fat can join and separate from the rest of the milk.
5. Why is butter Yellow? The yellow colour initially came from the carotene in the cows' diet. Today it's as likely to be artificial colouring to make it look yellower. That is not such a new thing as you might think. During the Middle Ages, Marigold flowers were used to make butter more yellow.
6. The country which produces the most butter is India, followed by the USA, France, Germany and New Zealand. India doesn't export much of its butter, though, whereas New Zealand does. The country which consumes the most butter per person is France.
7. Ghee, a vital ingredient in Indian cuisine, is clarified butter, made by heating butter to its melting point and allowing it to cool; the remaining components separate by density and the pure butterfat can be poured off. In India, ghee is seen as a symbol of purity and is offered to the gods; there is a children's tale of a young Krishna stealing butter.
8. Butter becomes spreadable at about 15 °C (60 °F), which is warmer than the inside of the Fridge. Keeping it outside the fridge means it goes off quickly. Some fridges have a special butter compartment which is slightly warmer and may even have a small heater. Keeping butter wrapped extends its shelf life, in or out of the fridge. In ancient times, people had ingenious methods of storing butter so it wouldn't go rancid. In Ireland, they used to put butter in barrels and bury it in peat bogs, where it would keep for years because of the cool, airless, antiseptic and acidic environment of a peat bog. It would, however, develop a strong, peaty flavour. Barrels of ancient butter are still dug up by archaeologists today. It resembles grey cheese and isn't edible.
9. At one time, only poor people and barbarians ate butter. The Greek comic poet Anaxandrides coined the phrase boutyrophagoi, or "butter-eaters" to refer to Northern barbarians. In the middle ages butter was seen as a food only fit for peasants. It wasn't until the 16th century, when the Roman Catholic Church decreed people could eat butter during Lent, that it caught on with the middle classes.
10. People didn't just eat the stuff, either. Around the same time, it was used to burn in lamps instead of oil during Lent and when oil was scarce.

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