The tale of the butter dish

A few months ago I stopped using blended 'spreadable' butter and switched to pure butter after reading about the not-so-great benefits of some oils used in products like this.  I was happy with the switch but absolutely did not enjoy struggling with trying to get slivers of rock hard butter onto my toast without ripping it to shreds or leaving chunks of unmelted butter sitting forlornly on top.

I decided to go all old-school and buy a butter dish so I could safely keep the butter out of the fridge and slather it easily onto piping hot toast in the mornings - but I never imagined how difficult this task would be.

The first stop was Kmart and Target - no go.  It seems that everyone prefers spreadable butter these days and a butter dish isn't part of the usual stock. Then I started looking in kitchenware and homeware shops.  Occasionally I'd find one, but they were all so ugly that I couldn't bring myself to buy one. They were also all glass - and knowing how clumsy I am, I didn't think that a glass butter dish and me without the benefit of coffee would be a good match.

Finally I found something I thought would do the job nicely - an Anna Gare ceramic butter dish.  Cream, tastefully decorated with a homey decoration in pale colours, I thought it would do the job nicely and despite the fact that it was a bit expensive, I decided to look on it as an investment and bought it.

I put a moderate amount of butter into the dish and set it in a cool corner of my kitchen.  For the first day or so, it worked a treat. The butter was very soft (it is summer after all) but it kept well and spread beautifully. However my butter problems were only just beginning.

After a few days of lifting the lid, I noticed that some butter was getting caught around the edge and had seeped into the bottom of the lid. I cleaned it all up and put a smaller amount of butter in the dish, but the next day it spread again and as soon as it touched the lid, it seeped into the lid again and stained the whole bottom of the lid.  Ceramic - it seems - is only water and stain proof if you actually glaze it and the base of the lid.  In this case, the bottom of the lid - the bit that actually rests on the dish - was not glazed.  Aggggghhhhhh!

I tried everything to get rid of the stain but it didn't come out (Anna, if you are reading this, why would you make a butter dish in cream and not glaze the entire thing???). I gave it up as a bad job and went back to cold butter but the whole thing kept niggling away at me.


Isn't it pretty?

A few days before Christmas I was shopping in a cute little boutique and I found a dinky little butter dish with a built in little bowl on the plate to keep the butter from spreading along the base and a lovely dome cover that protected the whole thing.  It was pretty, it was hand painted in Poland (obviously they know their butter in Poland). It was perfect - but it was verrrrrrrry expensive.  I went back twice to look at it and finally bought it the day before Christmas, had it gift wrapped and got my father to give it to me for Christmas. Thanks Dad!

The moral of the story is that the road to purity is not simple - and you need to do a lot of research if you want to add something like a butter dish to your kitchen equipment.  I share this story in the hopes that it saves someone else from a similar trauma.  ;-)




No mess!