Flaaaaaaaavor

A friend of mine and fellow diver—we'll call him Ivan—positively drowns his food in butter. Ivan's also a bit of a gourmand and quite the fan of French cuisine, and I don't mean that Americanized nouvelle légere crap either. No no. Ivan delights in high concentrations of cream, butter, lobster, cheese, foie gras: all the jolly crew. Said friend explained his preference to me quite concisely over croissants at dinner one evening: he pointed to a croissant (a scrap of bread that, by definition, is already at least on third butter by weight) upon which he had lavished a soft butterknife-load of butter and, leaning closer to me, intoned the mantra, "Flaaaaaaavor."

Said friend also has—despite much cycling and swimming to combat it—the average American male physique: ovate. I don't know that I want to accept any age- or socio-economic-status-related correspondence there, however. I myself am 45 years old and rarely above 8% body fat. I spent several years religiously following the Zone® diet, but I have become increasingly lax in that respect over the past three years. I still follow the general Zone principle of keeping my protein intake to approximately thirty percent of my diet, but I eat a lot more high glycemic carbohydrate and a good deal more "unhealthy" fat than during my evangelistic phase. My reason? Well, I think Ivan nailed it:

Flaaaaaaavor.

My ex-wife (wife, at the time) and I were dining at a steak house with a couple of acquaintances in Idaho some years ago, a young couple who had been teenagers during the eighties. When the server brought the obligatory bread and butter, they asked for a substitute for the butter. Neither of them, they claimed, could stomach the stuff--the real stuff--butter. They preferred margarine. They said butter tastes too milky. In fact, they launched into lengthy discussion of the merits of various margarine brands and oil types: corn, safflower, sunflower. I can't reproduce what they said here. I was too busy being disgusted at the thought of anyone wanting margarine for any purpose at any time on any food item to recall the details. In any case, I know that I, for one, will never develop a taste for margarine.

Oddly, I also grew up in a household stocked with margarine in stead of butter. Butter was considered unhealthy (saturated fat instead of polyunsaturates). I can still recall my family's joy at the introduction of whipped margarines, which meant they would never again have to shred a slice of toast while attempting to make it palatable by spreading fat on it. Mom and Dad both considered restaurant bread with real honest-to-God butter a serious treat. Both would sigh and lean back in their seats and wax nostalgic on recently-churned butter and ice boxes. Still, my parents never for a moment considered keeping butter in the house. Butter could spoil, was more expensive than margarine, and was supposed to be the unhealthy alternative to the wonders of polyunsaturated fats.

At the time, I really didn't care much one way or the other. Fat and I have long enjoyed a weird love/hate relationship. When I was a child, butter and margarine were all just gelatinous slime to me. I hated fat, grease, and fatty foods. I absolutely detest lard and tallow and shortening. I've always gone out of my way to strip the excess fat from meat and poultry. I like sausage, but a little too much nauseates me and gives me a headache. Pasteurized processed cheese-food (whatever the hell that is) has the same effect on me as sausage, but I consider this no loss as I would rather have holes drilled in my teeth than eat imitation cheese.

Still, even as a child I understood that there was something strangely enticing about butter. Though not a big fan of buttered bread (or bread in general—I tend to think of bread and pasta as bases upon which to serve actual food), I have long preferred the taste of butter to that of margarine. Likewise, on vegetables I can always tell butter (which adds a distinct richness) to margarine (which just makes everything oily).

The problem of flavor, you see, is multifaceted. Butter alone is about as flavorful as recycled plastic grocery bags. Slightly milky-tasting coagulated oil--de gustibus and all, but my doesn't that sound flavorful? Well, no, of course not. Can you imagine a restaurant offering butter, in any form, as a main dish? Or even as a side dish? Grilled salmon with a side slab of butter on field greens--Cobb salad with chunks of Danish whole-milk butter, ribeye with a side of whipped butter and garlic. Bleah.

On the other hand, can you imagine a restaurant charging for the butter they bring out with the bread? I tend to avoid the places that offer me oleo with my bread, and I'm not a big bread eater. All the nutritional experts agree, however, that fat accounts for a good deal of what we experience as flavor. The richer, saturated fats seem to hold a certain preeminence in that department. Olive oil, sesame oil, peanut oil, and almond oil all have stronger, more readily identifiable flavors than butter, but it's the butter-based dishes (Hollandaise and Bearnaise sauces, Sole Meuniere, beurre blanc) that get labelled luxuriant.

So, butter improves (for most tastes) the flavor of food, but butter by itself is not something most of us want to eat. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a dish can be too buttery. I've made this mistake in preparation. Any fish prepared meuniere (fried in clarified butter) must be cooked quickly or the fish (and the thin coating of flour) soaks up too much butter. Not to make this too simple, too high a temperature tends to over cook the thinner parts of the fish while undercooking the rest. C'est la vie.