So goes the old tongue twister, but it's true. Such is its gift to most any food it melds with in the heat of an oven, a food like the humble little batch of blueberry apple crisp I made this afternoon. But some foods just like some plants, can touch our muse to rouse higher thoughts, foods that come as emissaries of things transcendent. I think butter must have come to this poet that way, and she wrote a lovely tribute to it.
BUTTER
Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet it has so many imitators.
I help a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the decolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!
And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even creme do la creme.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may grace a king's table.
We have a yellow bowl near
the toaster
where summer's butter glows
soft and sentimental.
We love it better for its weeping,
its nostalgia for buckets and churns
and deep stone wells,
for the press of a wooden butter mold
shaped like a swollen heart.--by Connie Wanek, Reader's Digest, November, 2011
Happy autumn baking!
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