We owe many of the big inventions that enrich our present day to chance. It was probably the same with butter. Historians assume that shepherds who carried milk in jars while travelling asked themselves why they often started off with liquid milk which had become solid when they reached their destination. Being shaken while riding was the very simple explanation.

The principle was already known in early times, yet the production of butter remained hard manual labour until well into the 19th century: Milk was left in a bowl until cream formed, which was then skimmed off. It then had to be placed in a butter churn and stirred energetically until the buttermilk separated from the cream. Only after the invention of the centrifuge by Wilhelm Lefeldt in 1877 did churning come to an end and butter also gradually became available to people who owned neither a cow nor a churn.

When the gourmets of modern times linger in front of the refrigerated section this is no longer due to the sweaty preparatory work, but simply to the range of products available to us today: Sweat cream butter, originally from south Germany, so suitable for cakes, pastries or the sweat spread on bread, hearty sour cream butter from soured cream that tastes so perfectly good with a slice of sausage, cheese or raw ham, or the slightly sour, creamy mildly soured butter that goes well with all milder foods are standard products in good supermarkets.

But the important vitamins A, E, D, minerals and trace elements that the dairy product reliably supplies us with and strengthens the body’s immune system is also found in butter specialities such as anchovy, herbal or garlic butter or in butter oil, particularly well suited for frying or baking at high temperatures.

Anyone unafraid of heading off to the delicatessen or even to France truly has the choice: Breton butter refined with Fleur de Sel and egg yolk yellow Beurre d’Isigny from Calvados, awarded the AOC seal, tasting so well of cow and pasture, are next to the bread baskets of gourmets all over the world. And because butter has the property of pleasantly accenting nearly any flavour it meets it can also be harmlessly mixed with the finest of natural products. The result is salmon, crevette and corail butter (with lobster or crab roe), shallot, crayfish, red wine and crab butter, herbal butter specially made for filling snail shells, horseradish butter created for smoked salmon bread rolls, truffle butter and much more.

And why does the German expression “alles in Butter” translate as “everything is fine”? In the Middle Ages precious Venetian glassware was packed in butter fat for the difficult journey across the Alps. And sometimes a drum fell off the carriage. “Alles (everything) in Butter”, so nothing was damaged!