I have a good friend that says I fry the best pan fried oysters in the entire world. My response is always: “Give me enough butter and I can make your shoes taste good” It’s true. Who would have thought that the fat from bovine lactate, churned and solidified with a little salt could taste so good. Someone once asked Paula Dean’s son what he thought his mother’s favorite desert was and he said “butter”. My grandfather ,CR Snelgrove ate cooked cereal most mornings. I never saw him put sugar or milk or even cream on it. He always put a half a stick of butter on his hot cereal. In case you are wondering how that affected his health, he lived into his 90’s.
My preference currently is old butter. You know, the kind that sits in a cave covered with mold and is finally brought to the light of day under the name of cheese. I am currently making my way down the cheese isle at the local grocery chain. It may take me six more months to sample all the cheeses that are on the shelf. Next to all the ready packaged varieties is a counter with three fulltime employees who have at their disposal about 200 different cheeses. They wield long two handled knifes, ready at an instant to carve off any portion of those giant rounds. I have to stop for a moment. I am beginning to drool.
My assertion that you can eat anything given enough butter was proven once again when I recently brought home a dozen snails. They were previously purged, cleaned and cooked and stuffed back in their shells in a mixture of BUTTER, garlic, and chopped parsley. If you actually think about it, the thought of eating the slimy gastropods that chew up the veggies in my garden is pretty disgusting. I cooked them in the oven until the butter melted and we picked them out of the shells with tooth picks. The French actually have a utensil that holds the shell while you pick out the snail with a small fork. My wife’s response to the first snail was, “they are not too bad.” She only ate one which means that on a scale of 1 to 100 they ranked about a 2 for her. Since I translate for her all the time, I will translate for you as well. “They are not too bad” accurately translated means: “who in their right mind would ever eat more than one of these things.” I ate my half dozen and came away with the conclusion that I could have stuffed the shells with parts of an inner tube from my bicycle and it would have tasted about the same. So much for the old escargot myth of snails being a delicacy. It’s all about the butter.
For right now I think I will stick to the cheese, the yogurt, the ice cream while we spend the next year here.
Thanks for listening, I feel much better.
