Food - Bee Wilson is fed up with olive oil
After one too many slicked-over plates of greenly oiled salad, I have had enough. Summer is the season not of oil but of butter. Olive oil may be nice, but butter is better.
We think butter is too "heavy" for summer. In the cream-curdling heat, we fancy we aren't very hungry. So for supper we might eat "just" a light risotto, thick with Parmesan and finished with a "lug" of olive oil, Jamie Oliver-style. For lunch, we might manage "only" a light green salad, ie, some leaves heavily drenched in garlic and fattening Tuscan oil, and perhaps a little bowl of potatoes, similarly greased with herbs and oil, with maybe another "light" salad of squid or some similarly doused tuna and beans, and a delicate couscous and charred red-pepper mixture on the side, which has been "fed" with a mere pint or so of the green nectar. Because we are eating "healthily", we do not butter our bread.
How much nicer, how much more summery it would be to dine on baked white fish with buttery petits pois a la francais; roasted lemon chicken and tarragon with lightly buttered rice and spinach to soak up a thin gravy; potted shrimps sealed with clarified butter spread on thin white toast; or even a small plain steak with bearnaise, tomato salad and green beans. Butter can taste wonderfully light, if you give it the chance. Only a few slivers are needed to improve a whole dish.
Broad beans, french beans, courgettes, asparagus, sorrel, parsley, carrots - all these go beautifully with butter. Summer fruits, too, are enhanced by buttery things: try raspberries with a sand cake or sugared peaches with crisp little biscuits.
The temperature of butter is a vexed question in winter, when it is always too hard, but not in summer. Either you eat it straight from the fridge, in which case it is cold and sweet, or you leave it out for only a few minutes, in which case it is delectably spreadable.
You can even, improbable as it sounds, use butter to dress a lettuce. This is an idea imported from Vienna. There, the dish is called Gruner Salat mit brauner Butter (green salad with brown butter), but I prefer it if the butter isn't browned. For it to taste right, three things are essential. First, use a very crisp lettuce, such as Romaine. Second, make it in a china bowl (this may sound pernickety, but the flavours are pure and a wooden bowl would corrupt them). Third, make it the last second before you eat it, otherwise the butter will harden.
For two people, you need one large lettuce, half a lemon, salt, sugar and 25-50g of best butter (I tend to use slightly salted butter in summer because it keeps better). Squeeze about a dessertspoon of lemon into a cup and mix with a pinch of salt and another of sugar. Pour over the torn lettuce in the bowl and mix well. Melt the butter and, when it is just about foaming, pour over the lettuce. Eat at once, with more lemon at the table.
If, however, you have no butter to hand, and happen to be going horseriding this summer, you could try a trick suggested by Alexandre Dumas (author of The Three Musketeers). Fill a bottle three-quarters full of milk (cow's, goat's, mare's) and hang it round your horse's neck. Set off wherever you are going and, when you arrive in the evening, you will find "a piece of butter the size of a fist" just waiting to be eaten. You can't do that with olive oil.
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