“i think you might as well switch to butter,” is one of the last things my mother said to me, before she got on the plane home last month. we were brought up on margarine, but for a few years now she’s been trying to get me onto one or another miracle yellow bread spread product.

about four years ago she announced that my preferred choice of spreadable butter-canola blend should be replaced by this tub of gloopy yellow grease that she had just bought at the supermarket. it was gloopy, i think, because its manufacture did not include the evil, death-causing process of hydrogenation. so it may have prevented your arteries from being clogged up (and in fact i think it may have been one of the cholesterol-reducing spreads), but the gloopiness was like a suspicious slick on your toast, which became a very disagreeable slick on your tongue. i just could not get that gloopy, slicky feel off my tongue, no matter how hard i scraped with my teeth. i can’t remember what it tasted of (gloop?), so the flavour was probably surprisingly un-disagreeable, but i do remember that one of the ingredients in this product was rosemary extract. perhaps it was added to counter the actual taste of the gloop, by neutralising it. my mother dutifully ate this spread on her bread for the rest of her trip, but when she left, it sat quite unloved at the back of the fridge, for months probably, before i stopped feeling bad about throwing it out.

texture is an important factor in butter or margarine or hybrid yellow spread isn’t it? you want it sort of solid, so you can scrape it on your toast, and watch it melt and sink into the surface, so you can see the texture of your bread, rendered all shiny and golden with melted butter. the gloop started off gloopy, and then had the audacity not to melt or sink; it just sat on the surface of the toast, waiting to ambush your hapless tongue. but maybe this was intentional. i read a diet tip once, where the advice was to wait until your toast became cold before you buttered it, so that the butter would not melt and sink, so that you could see how much butter you had put on, and not re-butter an already buttered spot. oh how i laughed, and then put down the magazine to never read again.

in the meantime, my mother had been happily eating her special health-giving margarines until just a few weeks ago when she discovered that her preferred product had changed its formula, and contained trans fats, just like all the other margarines on the market. “aiyah, you know,” she said, “sometimes i think i will just switch to butter. i mean, how much do you eat at one time anyway, and it tastes so nice when they give it to you at a restaurant.”

sometimes my mother astounds me with her clarity.

so last week, at the end of my tub of spreadable butter-canola blend, i bought a block of lightly salted butter at the supermarket. and so clearly, i had to also buy a butter dish. a simple task, no? i searched the kitchen departments of big city department stores, and trawled through the underground homewares emporium. “yes, butter dish!” was what the shop person would say. “right over here… er, over there… er, we seem to be out of stock.”

i went online; ebay had an eclectic selection including a tupperware set where the description of “mission brown” was included as though it were a good thing, a depression era glass specimen weighing two kilos, a crystal heirloom with a reserve price of $98 (no bids yet), and a porcelain one in the shape of a cow. and yet none of these were quite what i was after.

at one online shop, a search for “butter dish” gave me this:

which actually i would not mind having, but being a limoges legle provencal blue butter dish, it costs just under $100, not including postage.

finally i went up the street to the local kitchenware shop, where i had previously seen a glass butter tub with an embossed cow on the lid… but it had been sold. recently, even, because there was still a sad rectangle of empty space where it had previously stood. i thought i should get the one that remained, before it too disappeared: a simple, white china dish, square, with a modest little knob on the lid:

everything the limoges is not… except, um, of course, a butter dish.

as i paid for my new material possession (and this is the sad truth: having run out of things to buy, i create situations which will allow me to buy related accroutement i might otherwise not have to. switching to butter… having a kid… etc… just watch, now that i have a butter dish i’ll have to go out and buy a stick of salty, cultured french butter), it struck me that i had been mistaken. it wasn’t that people didn’t eat butter so there should be plenty of butter dishes in the shops, or even that people didn’t eat butter so there was no demand for butter dishes and no reason to keep them in stock. it was that everyone is eating butter these days, and butter dish supplies cannot keep up. i don’t mean to alarm you, but this winter, we are facing a critical butter dish shortage.