. Life -dark -red
Are you a butter or margarine person? Why do you make that choice?
Is it that you love butter but it costs twice as much as margarine , so there’s no real choice, you just can’t justify having the butter?
I slurp as I lick my lips and my fingers. Butter melts into and drips from my toasted rolls. So much joy in the taste of it. I remember butter, great lumps of it sliding down potatoes, the potatoes we had with bacon and cabbage when I was a child. I remember the farmhouse table at my grandmother's house, with a fresh cob loaf and butter cut into wedges to be placed on the bread and eaten like that, no spreading involved.
I take my time prolonging the happiness going on in my mouth, a happiness that actually feels as if it’s in my brain, and which travels through my body. While I’m in my temporary Heaven, I ponder the fact that for years, while bringing up the children we chose, for reasons of cost and many mouths to feed, to buy cheap margarine.
Now, margarine is not the same thing as butter, is it? Because , isn’t it true that you wouldn’t want, nobody would want , margarine dripping down your chin or to bite into thick lumps of it in your sandwich, which means that you eat less or none at all, being as it’s not the tastiest accompaniment to your fresh bread. You wouldn’t put slabs of it, for instance, onto your toast and let it soak in and then put more on, just to feel and taste the deliciousness of it on the warm toast.
But all the children have left home now, so we can spoil ourselves, eating nearly half a pound of butter each every week. I know, that’s a lot right? It could be more, though. we have to be temperate with it. It’s hard.
My mother and my grandmother both had butter in their pantry or fridge all the time, having no time at all for the unnatural alternative and mum would bring her own with her ( only Kerrygold would do) whenever she came to visit.
It has become, for me, one of the pleasures of life, which I don’t want to give up but which I have to watch carefully because I am eating a lot more bread and new potatoes, both tasting so delicious with the added knob of butter.
