Part 1: 

I have a cookbook from the church my grandma loved. It’s called Heavenly Delights: a Collection of Recipes and was put together by women from St. John Lutheran Church in Mosinee, Wisconsin. I’ve gone through it and dog-eared each page where one of her recipes is printed (there are nine). And, representing Midwestern church cookbooks well, about half of its 300 pages boast recipes for carbs and refined sugar in the form of breads, pies, pastries, cookies, and cakes.

And yet, Grandma’s butter cookie recipe isn’t in this book. Did she think it was too simple to submit? Or did she assume everyone knew the recipe already? Did all the church ladies agree to bypass butter cookies since none exist in this book anywhere? Since my grandma died in her late 90s back in 2018, I have no choice but to wonder. 

Thankfully, I have her recipe. And better yet, every Christmas my dad makes a quadruple batch to share. I hoard those cookies. I will freeze them in tiny Ziploc bags and dole them out (mostly to myself, and secretly) like treasures all year long. The best ones have sandy, golden edges; where the butter began to brown in the oven, perfectly caramelizing the sugar and toasting the flour.

Just three ingredients; sugar, flour, and butter transport me back in time, delivering me to her kitchen, resurrecting my grandma for a wonderful moment. And of these three ingredients, the greatest, by far, is butter.

Part 2:

Salted, unsalted, and cultured; the trinity of butter. Despite what the chefs say, I pretty much use salted for everything, even when I ‘should’ be using unsalted. The exception is when there is deliciously crispy, crusty bread in my house. Then I will trek through blizzards to the store for some cultured butter. A smear of that on real bread, sprinkled with some coarse salt, well, that’s the Good Life. Butter makes ordinary things extraordinary. 

Seamus Heaney, in his poem “Churning Day” described butter as “coagulated sunlight.” And, scientifically he’s sort of right. Cows eat grasses which, in a plant sort of way ‘eat’ sunshine, and then the cows’ bodies turn that grassy sunshine into milk. If you leave fresh cow milk to settle, a rich sunshiny cream will float to the top. Churning, stirring, or shaking that cream will cause coagulation of some magical milk fats. Voila, butter! Coagulated sunlight. 

My kids, in preschool, coagulated sunshine by shaking small jars of heavy whipping cream with their own tiny hands. We, their families, ate this homemade butter at the annual Thanksgiving Feast. Because the preschoolers made the Feast’s menu, their holy butter was spread on blueberry muffins, hotdog buns, and pancakes. It was mixed with peanut butter on purpose and soy sauce by accident. It dripped down cheeks and onto dress-up clothes. 

The whole gathering- people, tables, and food- were anointed with this lovingly made butter.

Julia Child said, “With enough butter, anything is good.” She, as usual, wasn’t wrong.

Part 3: 

Food makes me happy. I love to learn about it, plan it, gather it, grow it, and prepare it. I love to cook and I’m pretty good at it. My spouse makes me feel like a Michelin star chef, which I’m absolutely not, but I am a little fueled by his compliments. One of my two kids will eat most everything I put in front of them (never mind that the other would happily subsist on ranch dressing), so I count that as a win. 

But since I am a home cook with kids and a busy spouse, I often find- with no time for a grocery run- that I’m missing one of dinner’s ‘required’ ingredients. Or two of them. Sometimes more. I’m not proud. By necessity I’ve become a master at substitution.

No buttermilk? Use plain yogurt instead. Ran out of soy sauce? Grab whatever half-used Trader Joe’s bottles of goyza sauce or island soyaki, etc that are haunting the refrigerator and use them- no one will know. Same for nutmeg- before buying more, I just use up last November’s pumpkin pie spice mix first. Is cheese off limits because we’re out of the kid’s Lactaid? Sprinkle in some nutritional yeast. (But could someone please tell me what’s nutritional about it?) 

The one thing I can’t substitute? Butter. Because butter comes straight from God and no one can fake that. 

You cannot make an alfredo sauce from scratch without the holiness of butter. Baking without butter- without the flakiness, without the deeply rich flavor- is not worth the effort. A cake without buttercream? No thank you. And that slice of toast without butter? It’s just messy sandpaper, leaving a trail of sharp crumbs. 

Butter transforms. But it’s so ordinary, sitting there on the counter I walk past hundreds of times a day, that I forget. I forget its magic until I’ve run out. I forget how it transports and browns and resurrects and smears. And then I’m lost and hungry for some sunshine. Hungry for something extraordinary. Hungry for some holiness.

Part 4: 

James Beard Award winner, Michael Ruhlman wrote in his 2011 book Ruhlman’s Twenty, “Here is a truism that makes the uncertainties and stresses of life a little more manageable: few things cannot be made better with the addition of a little (more) butter.”

The same is true, I think, with holiness. However holiness looks for you; an old hymn, your grandma’s cookbook, a meditative hike in the woods, or a dinner with friends; few things cannot be made better with the addition of a little (more) holiness. And butter. Always butter.