Is there any rationale behind sticks of butter being in different shapes in different parts of the country?
I grew up in Chicago, and butter there is skinny - perhaps an inch and a quarter on a side, and about five inches long. I’m told it’s the same on the East Coast.
In California, butter’s usually shorter, fatter lumps - perhaps an inch and a half on a side, and 4 inches long.
Other than possibly being able to cut off a piece with slightly greater accuracy as the pre-printed lines on the wrapper are farther apart with the Midwest/East butter, is there any reason other than the old standby “But it’s always been like that!”?
(I flipped a coin to decide if this was a General Question that has one good answer, or if it’s a Cafe Society thing because it involves food. GQ won. For now, at least.)
I don’t think it’s a regional variation thing. In my grocery store, I can find both shapes sitting next to each other on the shelf. It’s probably just what kind of butter packing machine your local dairy bought.
The long, thin sticks are “Elgin,” or eastern pack sticks. They are 4 3/4" by 1 1/4" by 1 1/4". The shorter, fatter sticks are Western-pack style butter sticks, which are 3 1/8" long by 1 1/2" by 1 1/2". Both have the same amount of butter (8 Tablespoons = 1/2 cup).
According to Cook’s Illustrated, the former were originally created by a dairy in Elgin, Illinois, and are common east of the Rockies. However, at “some point” (the magazine doesn’t say when), some dairies on the West Coast changed the shape of their butter printers, making shorter, fatter sticks. The challenge is to find a butter dish that holds the Western style; most are shaped for Elgin sticks.
This information found in the November - December, 2005 issue, page 3.
It’s not likely to be an old variation, because butter dishes are made for the longer sticks. I can’t see house wives buying butter they have to reshape to use the dish recent as 40 years ago.
Butter and other dairy products are produced locally and distibuted locally, for the most part. This explains how butter can avoid some sort of unwritten national standard.
Looks like I picked just the right time to wonder about butter.
What got me wondering was that I’ve been living in California for getting on 20 years and have grown accustomed to the fat sticks. Last week, we bought Land-O-Lakes butter as it was on a twofer sale and thought nothing of it until last night when I opened the box to find skinny sticks.
Either L-O-L is on a crusade to introduce skinny butter out here, or this batch was trucked in from Minneapolis. I find either possibility fairly remote. Another possibility is they’ve been selling skinny sticks here all along and I’ve just never bought them until last week as my usual brand is Challenge. Unsalted, please!
FWIW, my Fiestaware butter dish holds either type of stick just fine.
And then there is what I (an American) call “European” butter–1/2 pound slabs, which I think are like two Elgin sticks stuck together, for total dimensions of 2.5 x 1.25 x 4.75. And I even found a butter dish that fits it, at Target.
gotpasswords, you use unsalted butter for spreading? :dubious: Doesn’t it lack flavor? (for baking, I understand completely)
Why would trucking it in be unusual? Refrigerated trucks, and only 1/2 a continent is easy stuff. I’m pretty sure that the LOL butter in NH is from the “home plant” as well.
I’d have expected butter plants to be more regional, as are the dairies that produce milk. In this part of the state, at least, I don’t think milk travels more than 100 miles between cow and supermarket.
As for spreading, unsalted butter has flavor - it’s just not covered up by salt. The unsalted stuff is also going to be made with the best available cream - cream that’s just a nudge past its prime can be used in the salted butter as the salt can mask a slight “off” character. I work with enough “foodies” that I don’t dare try to slip in lesser-grade ingredients. Last year, I made some cookies and brought them to the office and someone was very clear in noting the quality of butter used.
Can anyone confirm that a single company markets both shapes? Else, we’re just looking at variety (here in NY, we have mostly skinny sticks, but also the fat ones, via Keller–plus the solid one-pound blocks from many companies).
In Australia that’s what we get, you buy butter in either 250g or 500g rectangular blocks. Until this thread I’ve always been really vague about what sticks of butter are exactly, except a pain when adjusting American recipes. So now I’m enlightened.
Australian butter dishes are designed for the 250g blocks, although I’ve seen vintage ones which would fit the bigger size.
There is a long discussion on eGullet somewhere about European vs American butter, but from memory it came down to a couple of things. European butter has a higher butterfat content, comes from different cows, which have lower milk yields but produce better milk, and is fresher. I will try and find the thread a bit later.
