Finally, when Keller opened Per Se in New York in 2004, St. More chefs started calling, as did The French Laundry alumni who’d moved on to other Michelin-starred restaurants. Claire’s butter, and pretty soon word spread. “The nuances are pretty dramatic from spring to summer to fall to winter, because of what the cows eat.” Keller’s customers loved St. In terms of flavor, Animal Farm Butter “changes throughout the year,” Keller says. Claire also added lactobacillus to make a cultured butter that would have tang and flavor, like sourdough.
While nearly every dairy in the country uses a mechanical separator because it’s faster and captures more cream, a hand ladle is gentler, keeping the fat globules intact for a thicker and richer end product with higher butter fat. Claire worked methodically, using a hand ladle to separate cream from milk. This was not restaurant butter as I remembered it: a sad, foil wrapped rectangle melting into a pool next to a dinner roll. The kitchen had dressed it up with coarse sea salt and a dusting of ground black pepper. When the very fancy butter arrived, it was perched on a rustic wood board, deep yellow and sitting opposite a loaf of olive ciabatta. But thanks to a handful of restaurants and creameries around the country, that’s all starting to change. Butter is certainly never the reason one would buy the ticket in the first place. People might notice it because it’s tossed onstage, they accept it because it’s typically free, and they semi-appreciate it because it temporarily stops the crowd from complaining that the main act is taking too long to show up. I grew up in an America where butter has only ever been the warm-up act at a comedy show.
And in the end, curiosity won out I caved. Still, the waiter returned to push the bread and butter. Unconvinced that the age-old duo should carry such a cost, I went with the cow itself: beef tartare dotted with caviar and shavings of horseradish. Bread and butter were on the menu for $12, priced the same as a tempting chicken liver mousse. Inside Dedalus, a wine market and restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, I sat puzzled.