This might be a question for folks older than me (40). I know you couldn’t get it at one time here in Wisconsin. My dad would “smuggle” it in from Illinois.
But when did it very first come on the market? When did someone take a greasy glob of vegetable fat and say “Some dumb f#%ks will think this glop taste just like butter.” ?
Margarine, from what I have seen and been told, appeared somewhere during WW2 when there was a shortage on butter. Shortly after, it was popular enough to keep right on selling.
It originally arrived in a one pound cellophane packet, looking dull and greasy white with a small deep reddish orange gelatin capsule on the top. The ever eager wife of the time would squeeze the capsule to break it, releasing a concentrated yellow dye. She would then kneed the squishy mass in the bag until it turned a uniform ‘buttery’ yellow, shape it into a brick and place it in the refrigerator. Once it hardened, she stripped off the plastic and there was margarine fit for a king!
It was probably better than most of today’s margarine having no hydrolocized (SP?) oils or fats in it to keep it from turning into a puddle at room temperature.
Margarine was around long before WWII. Britannica.com states that it was invented in the 1860s.
I remember my mother doing this during the early 1940s.
Nasty.
I’m anti-margarine.
Accordning to http://www.margarine.org/history.html it was invented in 1870 by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez in response to an offer by the Emperor Louis Napoleon III for the production of a satisfactory substitute for butter.
During the forties, I think fake butter was referred to as oleo. My mother still refers to butter as this.