Quality is everything when it comes to buying butter, and the real thing is not easy to find, writes Hugo Arnold
As tea parties go, it was pretty special: cups of tea, freshly made scones and lots of chat. What made it rather unusual were the 60 people present, gathered as we were in Olga and Peter Ireson's house on the Beara peninsula. We were taking part in the Slow Food weekend in Kerry at the end of March, and we were on a mission to find out more about Knockatee Organic Dairy.
Olga and Peter moved to Ireland several years ago and bought a small holding of 35 acres. I was standing in bright spring sunshine looking at six Jersey cows chewing the cud among tufts of sea grass and rather a lot of mud.
Every day these enormously pretty animals are led across the yard to a shed, sweet with the smell of hay, silage and manure, for a twice-daily milk. Churns of milk are then manhandled across to the pristine dairy room where butter, cheese, yoghurt and cream are made in the dinkiest collection of stainless steel kit I have ever seen in a dairy.
Later, I eat the butter. What butter. I have not tasted anything quite like this since my childhood in Co Sligo. This is sheer heaven, nectar heavy with herbaceous scents, and a full-fat richness. There is also cream on the table, nothing white mind you, this is richly yellow, with a crust on top. We are all fighting for the two spoons, piling it onto just-baked scones. There is cheese too, a twin-curd and a Gouda style.
For a nation rich in a dairy culture, what now passes for cream and butter here is a travesty. Pale, tasteless, thin and insipid, I simply cannot be bothered to buy it. In the wilds of Kerry/Cork, somebody is making just what I want to buy, and instead I purchase French butter. Why? Availability and price apparently. Six cows don't make that much butter, and Peter says the price differential is too great. Knockatee butter retails at €14 a kilo. This compares with a few euros for a certain well-known butter with a gold wrapper. Yet, the two are not comparable. Heaven and hell, chalk and, well, not cheese.