Olivia Potts - Butter a celebration

For Elwood, of course

First published in 2022 by Headline Home,

an imprint of Headline Publishing Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.headline.co.uk

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Text copyright Olivia Potts 2022

Design and layout copyright Headline Publishing Group 2022

Photography copyright Matt Russell 2022

Photography Jamie Drew

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Every effort has been made to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material. The author and publisher will be glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Olivia Potts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN 978 1 4722 8464 8

eISBN 978 1 4722 8466 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Publisher: Lindsey Evans

Project Editors: Dan Hurst and Kate Miles

Assistant Editor: Kathryn Allen

Designer: Matt Cox at Newman+Eastwood

Photographer: Matt Russell

Food and Prop Stylist: Emma Lahaye

Copy Editor: Annie Lee

Proofreader: Anne Sheasby

Indexer: Caroline Wilding

Senior Production Controller: Tina Paul

Ovens should be preheated to the specific temperature if using a fan-assisted oven, follow manufacturers instructions for adjusting the time and the temperature. Pepper should be freshly ground black pepper unless otherwise stated.

Jamie Drew

Olivia Potts is an award-winning writer and chef. After a career at the criminal bar, she retrained in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. She is resident cookery columnist at the Spectator and has written for delicious, Sainsbury's Magazine, Grazia, Glamour, The Times, Guardian and Telegraph. Olivia was the winner of the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award for her memoir A Half-Baked Idea and the Guild of Food Writers' Food Writer Award in 2020.

Also by Olivia Potts

A Half-Baked Idea

Swirled into hot sugar to create a silken, smoky caramel, or browned until nutty and speckled before being folded through cake batter or buttercream. Dotted on to vegetables before roasting or braising, stirred through rice after cooking. Butter wont just transform your individual dishes, but will transform your way of cooking.

Butter: A Celebration is a joyous immersion in all things butter, revelling in its alchemical power to transform almost any dish, from good to transcendent.

Award-winning food writer Olivia Potts takes us on a grand tour of butter and its many varied applications, from old school chicken Kiev to mille-feuille, from oysters Rockefeller to saffron and yoghurt tahdig. This is a book to be savoured for its wonderful writing, as well as for its irresistible recipes and expert introduction to patisserie, too. Full of history, anecdotes and, of course, delicious recipes resplendent with butter.

Turkish eggs with yoghurt and chilli butter

Butter-basted rib eye steak

Steamed artichoke with anchovy butter

Grilled kippers with horseradish butter

Buttermilk pancakes

Sticky gingerbread

French salted butter biscuits

Brioche feuillete

Damson plum crumble

Before we go any further, I must make a confession.

I did not grow up with butter. I do not have dreamy, creamy memories of local farm shop butter, or my mother stamping out buttery biscuits as I stood by her aproned hip. I did not have fresh, unsalted butter smeared on to warm, homemade bread as an after-school snack.

I am not nostalgic for butter. If anything, I am nostalgic for its imitator. I dont remember butter ever being in the fridge when I was younger, and I know for sure that we didnt own a butter dish. Instead, we ate spread tubs of butter mixed with oil to make it smooth and spreadable, and sometimes entirely dairy-free butter substitutes. My mothers sandwiches were precise, and satisfying, and made with quiet love, but they were always spread with, well, spread. My fathers mother was a prolific baker, but as a member of the post-war generation, she baked exclusively with margarine. Even today, the smell of a tub of Stork marg being rubbed into flour takes me straight back to Grandmas kitchen in Sunderland.

Dont get me wrong: I loved spread. For twenty-four years, spread was as good as it got. It melted on my toast, it lined my sandwiches, it pooled into my hot potatoes, and that was all I needed it to do. But our household, then, was not one that fetishised butter.

Back then, I didnt cook, and I certainly didnt bake: the only cake I ever made (the cake I would grandly call my signature dish) was Nigellas clementine cake, a cake which unusually requires absolutely no butter. As far as I was concerned, I had no need for butter.

And anyway, in my early twenties, I believed that if I used those 1-calorie cooking sprays instead of butter in my savoury dishes, I could one day look like Keira Knightley. The diet industry has a lot to answer for.

I am proof, if proof were needed, that it is possible to live a perfectly happy life without butter. But I can tell you that life is far richer with butter in it.

Of course, its not like I hadnt encountered butter. Id smudged hard little tin foil-wrapped pats of the stuff on to slightly dry scones in tearooms; Id ripped soft, sliced supermarket bread with it. There were even moments when butter and I almost found one another: a salami sandwich on a school trip to France, thick with pale, unsalted butter, unlike any sandwich Id ever eaten perfunctory, not made with any particular care, but remarkable in its own way. The thick millionaires shortbread made by the next-door caf that carried me through three years of university. I loved those things individually, but was blind to what they stood for; by my mid-twenties, I had left in my wake a trail of missed buttery connections.

You can divide my life into Before Butter and After Butter.

I have always been greedy. I have always loved to eat. But for a long time, I did not love to cook. In fact, I couldnt cook at all.

I started baking in earnest when I was twenty-four, after my mother died, and I needed something physical to ground me. In amidst the rolling, roiling grief, I gravitated towards bread dough and cake batters, pastries and sauces. I spent my days creaming butter for cakes, grating butter into flaky pastry, rolling butter out into perfect rectangles for croissants and Danishes, kneading whole pats of butter into bread dough until it turned primrose yellow for brioche, whisking butter into vinegar to make hollandaise and barnaise, spooning it on to hot steak over and over again, basting, and rubbing it into chicken skin. I cooked my way through cookbooks, from beginning to end, ticking off recipes as I went, and I learnt that so much of what I loved cooking depended on butter. You could manipulate it a thousand different ways, and get a thousand different results. And, somewhere along the line, I fell in love.