I know someone who went to Russia and said that they eat sticks of flavored butter there as a treat.
That may be assuming too much. I’m over 50, born and raised in the U.S., lived in the East and the Midwest and done a modest amount of traveling. I never heard of deep-fried candy bars until this thread. If she grew up overseas, she may not be as well-versed in these things as you thought.
I’m curious about how authoritative the claim of its being butter is. Did she deduce that from looking at it? Did someone with her assert that? Did she read it on a sign? And not misread the sign, which might have had the word “batter” rather than “butter”? Did a worker at the booth clearly say it was butter?
I won’t say it could not have been butter, but I find it much more plausible that it was something like cheese and that there are some misunderstandings, false assumptions, mix-ups and the like responsible for her thinking it was butter.
My first thought was battered, deep-fried mozarella cheese. I can see someone mistaking that for butter.
I’ve been to Russia twice and I’ve never heard of this, but then again it is a large country.
Look, folks, fairs and the like have LOTS of weird stuff. The other day, I was reading about eating deep fried Coke. Yeah, that’s right, take the syrup, mix it with a binding agent, and then drop it in the deep fryer.
I wouldn’t eat butter by the stick, but it might not be so bad if it was put together with a good batter.
The point is, we cannot say one way or the other, so let’s leave it at somewhat unlikely absent other evidence. 
I also don’t know when it was. I heard about it in the '80s but I don’t know how long before that he’d gone. For all I know it was years and years earlier.
Gary T writes:
> That may be assuming too much. I’m over 50, born and raised in the U.S., lived
> in the East and the Midwest and done a modest amount of traveling. I never
> heard of deep-fried candy bars until this thread. If she grew up overseas, she
> may not be as well-versed in these things as you thought.
Deep-fried candy bars were invented in Glasgow, Scotland:
They had that at the State Fair of Texas this year. I saw the sign and did a triple-take … Way too scared to try it. Or any of the other deep-fried ‘goodies’ that were being pushed, for that matter. :eek:
Hmmmm, good point. Still, I can’t see this working very well, and I think it would be disgusting.
DSYoungEsq, I saw the fried Coke thing on Keith Olbermann, and it seems like it was used to make funnel cake, so it really wasn’t straight coke, just a batter MADE with coke.
If it were a funnel cake, that was flavored with Coke, I might TRY it, just out of curiosity.
Other than that, I’m guessing the OP’s sister saw cheese-sticks. Cheese sticks are yummy-you can also get them frozen and bake them in the oven (or the microwave).
I have had the following items deep-fried: Oreos, Twinkies, Snickers, Milky Ways, pickles, green beens, ice cream, cheesecake, and of course cheese.
Deep-fried butter isn’t such a stretch if you know what cracklin’s are. Pork fat deep-fried in pork fat. MMMmmmm good.
Still, I think I would have to draw a line in the sand at deep-fried butter. Kinda makes me wanna hurl just thinking about it.
Never heard of that, but I have heard of chocolate-covered lard. Lemme see if I can dig up a cite…
Ah, yes, here it is…Sorry, that would be the Ukraine.
31,000 hits for “deep-fried Coke.”
1,720 for “deep-fried butter” (some "…deep fried. Butter…).
There is much assertion of the existence of deep-fried butter, but no particularly reputable claims to having actually sampled it in the first few pages of Googley goodness.
There are no images captioned deep-fried butter.
I went to the Indiana State Fair and didn’t see a deep-fried butter booth, and I saw pretty much everything, making careful note of the deep-fried stuff. There was the famous fried cheese booth just outside the midway, the obligatory fried candy bars, etc. There WAS a huge butter sculpture to commemorate the 150th year of the fair, and there might have been a butter booth near there where they indulged in some butter deep frying. Fortunately I missed it if they did.
I did hit the cream puff hut, the King Tater booth, the roasted corn, and sundry other fair food favorites (including honey ice cream). But I draw the line at deep-fried butter.
Ok, I will contact my sister and ask if indeed it’s possible she was looking at deepfried cheese. See, I find that plausible, but not likely, given that deep fried cheese has existed for quite awhile, and we’ve had it occasionally at different restaurants. So, I don’t see her pulse spiking at the sight of something that she’s eaten before.
But, ultimately, you guy’s are right: I’m coming off way too authoritative, and I’ll keep it on the d-l for now.
Deep fried butter? Wouldn’t that be on the same level as boiled water balls?
I live in Russia, and I’ve never heard of it.
I have seen stuff called ‘chocolate butter’ in the chill cabinets, but I always took that to be some sort of unbutter. With flavouring. That you would spread on something, like Nutella. However, I guess in the times when tasty and exciting foodstuffs were far less widely available, people might have eaten it in chunks.
I’ll check out the packaging and see if I can work out what this ‘chocolate butter’ actually is.
And pulykamell, I suspect (and hope) the chocolate covered lard has probably not caught on. Why waste good lard?
Would you believe, I was out of the country and missed the State Fair this year, so I didn’t get any deep fried Coke? Oooh, I was pissed. I wouldn’t have given up Florence, but Monaco? I’d have cheerfully traded Monaco for some deep fried Coke.
One person’s disgusting is another person’s escargot and frog’s legs.
Here goes. My sister emailed me back after I’d asked her if she’d actually mistaken the fried butter for something else.
Here’s what she wrote:
So, if you can trust my sister and her eye-witness account, it has been done. But question is whether it’s a staying trend.
indierock82, where do you (and your sister) live? It’s hardly a particularly American thing deep-frying weird sorts of food. As I pointed out before, this trend started really with chip shops in Glasgow deep-frying Mars bars.