Close enough, the problem is when used in foods like peanut butter, cookies and snacks it becomes… odiferous. Strong varnish and paintlike odors gives it away. Wouldn’t be as much of a problem except manufacturers have the weasel-esque “May contain one or more if the following…” Corn oil, palm oil, peanut, lard, beef tallow, safflower etc, nothing gets objectionable like Canola seems to.
How much margarine can you eat? If a four-pack of margarine is $1 and butter is $4, how much extra money is that amortized over the life of the box? It would be one thing if you were going through a pound of butter every day. But you use a little scrape every day. The smear of margarine on your toast costs $0.02, the smear of butter costs $0.10. Eight cents isn’t going to make any difference in your life, using real butter instead of margarine will.
Only if you’re a cow. The difference between margarine and butter is precisely that you can’t make butter, but you can make margarine.
And I think the actual original reason for the development of margarine was that it can be preserved better than butter. IIRC, it was developed for some army or another, for their traveling rations. The lower cost and purported health benefits came later (though I’m sure the army was also happy to have a lower cost, too).
Bump
I don’t really have a deep enough pocket for the real expensive stuff. Most of the wine I drink falls in the $15.00 to $25.00 range. I won’t drink two buck chuck and I won’t put it in my pasta sauce…
Huh. There’s plenty of decent wines in the $5-$8 range that are more than good enough for cooking. I honestly wouldn’t spend more than that for a wine I’m cooking with. Hell, I haven’t had a problem with three buck Chuck, myself, but you should taste it first, I suppose, because it varies quite a lot.
as far as I can tell that whole thing means little more than “don’t buy ‘cooking wine.’”
This thread title actually looked weird to me because I’m SO used to seeing combat spelled with the K
I’m very confused… around here every kindergarten or first grade student has put some cream into a jar and shaken it for 15-20 minutes to make butter. I don’t know of any kid who has made margarine.
Okay, fight ignorance. What does the salt do, preserve it like salted meats?
Who are you, Betty Botter? 
Yeah, when I was a kid. The margarine came in a plastic bag with a reddish/orangeish capsule which you broke. You then massaged the bag until the color was fully mixed in. The job was much sought after by said kids and you couldn’t do it out of turn.
Bob
Why not? I’d be willing to bet that you can’t even tell the difference between two-buck chuck and a 25 dollar cabernet in a pasta sauce, coq au vin, beef bourguignon, or anything along those lines. The heat of cooking pretty much wipes out any nuance the wine might have ever had, and the herbs, spices and salt pretty much destroy much beyond a a generic winey flavor.
Trust me, I know; the wife and I have tried it both ways, and it’s just a waste of good wine.
I’ve made lots of butter at home. I had no idea you could make margarine there.
Cows don’t make butter. They make milk. People make butter. As others have said, it can totally be done at home. And if you have a cow out back…start to finish…homemade butter.
And, apparently you can make margarine at home. I didn’t know that.
It helps with preservation, yes. But, in my experience, unsalted butter at room temp does fine for a week or so. (I’ve gone two weeks without noticing any rancidity.) Use the aforementioned butter bell if you find it going off quicker.
I leave butter on the counter all the time…we eat/cook with rather a lot of it, so it stays fresh enough. I only buy salted butter, though, unless I’ve picked up some fancy imported thing that’s struck my eye. If I cook with it, then I just don’t salt (further) the dish until I’ve tasted it. I’m not much of a baker, though, so I understand the desire for unsalted butter there.
If you’re afraid of it going bad, then just leave out half a stick (or a small slice from the butter that comes in blocks instead of sticks. I just use an ordinary covered butter dish like this.
I don’t think I’ve bought margarine or spread since I started doing my own grocery shopping 20 years ago. It’s usually less than $3/lb at Aldi or on sale. My mom used to get Shedd’s spread…eww. Which I believe is part of why I never learned to bake (never try to make cookies with that stuff).
Yeah, right now, it’s $2.50 each (1 lb) for Land O’ Lakes at the local Jewel. And the cheap brand is $1.99 a lb. Butter is not terribly expensive. I don’t know what margarine is per pound, but it can’t be all that much cheaper.
Can’t make butter at home? Then why back in the olden days did they all have butter churns in the kitchen?
They had access to unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk straight from the cow. Raw milk is harder to come by these days. It takes about three gallons to make a pound of butter. And raw milk is about $10/gal. You better really love your homemade butter.
If you’re starting with cream, then you’re not making butter. What is cream? It’s a bunch of little globules of butter. Churning just makes the little globules stick together into big globules.