Butter

The best kind of salted butter should shed tears. Tiny drops, like dew, pearl under the knife that spreads butter onto rye bread; we help ourselves and lick it off our fingers... There is only one region in the world where butter has its own religious ceremony. Mine.

Every year on the first Sunday after Pentecost, in Spézet in the heart of the Finistère, the locals celebrate its pardon with hymns and a procession at Notre-Dame-de-Krann and an offering to the Virgin sculpted by the hands of women. These pious parishioners probably aren't aware that they're perpetuating a pagan ritual. The Celts used butter in their ceremonies and their women made offerings to the goddess in the hope of being blessed with fertility. Not so long ago, a jar of butter was placed in the room of a dying person; after the burial, the butter was buried in the garden. Butter was said to absorb all the miasmas and purify the air.

Butter has the marvellous taste of my childhood. It is irreplaceable and anyone who hasn't indulged in buttered bread with oysters, spider crabs, prawns and cold lamb is depriving himself of one of the great pleasures of life. As for the Paris Brest, it's simple - I still can't resist it. I can't imagine cooking without butter. But it's important to know of which butter we speak.

Real butter is made of unpasteurised milk, churned and fresh, as it used to be made on every farm. Its quality and quantity showed the farmer's economic status and gave the women a certain financial independence. I wanted to learn everything about butter, so I spent a long and fascinating time watching Madame Vilain, in Plouer sur Rance near Saint-Malo, one of the few women who still makes her own churned butter on her farm with her own cows' milk. You had to see her knead the lumps with as much force as dexterity, salt, mould and unmould it, clean the churn with a handful of thistles to season it...

Today, as with bread, butter is made on the old-fashioned way. First a quality cream, taken from milk produced by grass-fed cows of the Froment du Léon or Pie Noir breed - the animal's diet makes for good milk which makes for good cream which makes for good butter. Spring butter, for instance, has the taste and aroma of flowers. You have to set aside the cream from the morning's milking and that of the evening, but separately. Then wait two days. You can then churn it. Cream is treated like a starter for bread. The big secret is to carefully "de-milk" it - that is, to remove as much of the buttermilk as possible. You churn it, changing the water until it is clear, then you remove the butter, weight it, salt it with fine sea salt by working it in with your fists, then knead it firmly so a little more water comes out. Then you make a pattern with a traditional box wood spatula. And there - kept in a cool place up to six days, preferably in a stoneware container carefully covered with parchment paper - you have unpasteurised butter, a delight. It's a food to be savoured, without waste and without excess. Butter, like its companion, bread, is a sacred thing.