Tuesday, April 20, 2010

"Du beurre,du beurre,du beurre ---"

When it comes to food I have three kinds of friends: hippie health food types, gourmands and people with diet histories. I guess I do have a few friends who eat junk food and don't really think much about it. So. Four kinds of friends.
Once I made a comment to my mother (person with diet history) that I use about a stick of butter a week. More if I bake. She thought that was an enormous amount. Mom sort of scrapes a bit of butter on her toast and then tops it with jelly. I'm not sure why the calories from the jelly are OK and the calories from the butter are not. I imagine it has to do with the fear of fats. I said something about it to a friend (hippie health food type) who also thought a stick of butter a week was quite a lot. I mentioned both conversations to a friend who is a pastry chef. We were shopping at the time and she simply pointed to her basket in which there was a pound of butter.
So I was amused when I read the quote from Fernand Point, ""Du beurre,du beurre,du beurre - that is the secret of good cooking in The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones. The book was a fun read. She is one of those women (Julia Child, MFK Fisher) who went to France and became a foodie. She was a central character in the evolution of foodie culture in this country. The book is conversational in style. I got bored with it for awhile but that's more about my state of mind than about the book. Yesterday I did a bunch of laundry so I finished the book while I was waiting for it but for some bits of writing attached to recipes in the last quarter of the book.
There are days when I don't eat any butter. I eat fruit and yogurt for breakfast when the weather is warm and less cooked food in general. No butter on pizzas although I was tempted to try some on a left over dough. I thought butter and honey might be good. In the end I used up some the left over tomato/leek sauce and some mozzarella. Another time perhaps.
If you told me I had to pick one thing to eat for the rest of my life it would be good bread and butter. That might seem like two things but I think Fernand would understand why it is one thing for me.

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