OVER recent weeks I’ve been in and out of several Parisian supermarkets and small grocery shops, stocking up on basics – milk, butter, bread, salad, cheese, sardines – things for quick lunches with minimal effort. With its varied and colourful packaging, the butter section alone packs quite a visual punch in terms of choice.
This is not surprising, given that France is the major butter producer in the European Union, churning out almost 450,000 tons every year, and in the supermarkets one finds pack after pack of charmingly labelled and designed butters, with pastoral-sounding names designed to appeal to the modern consumer’s sense of a rich and health-giving product.
Even in the heart of the city, one feels the French are never too far from the land, and they consume in excess of 17lbs per person a year, with a choice between unsalted butter (doux), salted (salé) and lightly salted (demi-sel), not to mention the cultured butters such as Isigny and Lescure, both of which are made with sour cream. Also available is beurre de baratte (churned rather than blended butter) and beurre allégé, which is blended with milk and cornstarch.
Other butters are produced on the farm (beurre fermier), with unpasteurised cream (beurre cru) or organic cream (beurre biologique or bio) The effect of such butter-gobbling isn’t immediately apparent in people’s body size, although like those in most other Western countries, even the French are beginning to pack on the kilos due to the availability of the usual processed fast foods. But they’re still relatively slim, and the muffin-belly which the Irish appear to have embraced with such abandon is largely absent. One survey suggests that the reason butter is not affecting the French so much, may be that a properly buttered snack – of, say, toast and sardines, or a buttery pastry, or even a sugar and butter saturated apple tatin – is so profoundly satisfying to belly and palate, due to the flavour of butter, that the consumer feels no need to return for seconds (or thirds).
Normandy and Brittany are the principal butter-producing regions. In Rennes, Jean-Yves Bordier runs Rennes Creamery, which is supplied with milk from Holstein and Norman cattle breeds, both of which have a high fat content. Nor does Bordier’s empire end there, as he also manages Saint Malo’s La Maison du Beurre, and his product sells directly into top hotels and restaurants throughout France.
It’s interesting to note difference in demand in Ireland, where butter is mostly salted, with a much smaller unsalted segment partly available for export to the Middle-Eastern market. However, in France, major creameries are also producing smoked salmon butter, seaweed butter, curried butter and the delicious, if hot, beurre au piment d’Espelette, The whole industry has come a long way in terms of product diversification since my girlhood in Monaghan, where my father John O’Donnell managed Town of Monaghan Co-Operative Society for more than 40 years. In A Border Co-Op, 1902-2002 (part memoir, part assessment of the dairy industry during his life), published some months before his death 10 years ago, he outlines the developments in the north west that brought about the gradual mergers with various branch creameries beneath the umbrella bodies of larger ones such as Killeshandra, Lough Egish and Monaghan, with the acquisition of Clones Co-Op being one of the critical landmarks in the Monaghan Co-Op’s history. Mergers meant a rationalisation of many facilities and services, to the advantage of the farmer-supplier, but the process of securing them could be fraught.
It was a time of constantly shifting emphasis, particularly during the 1970s, when the European experiment began to have an impact on machinery and production methods. Whether dealing with Alfa Laval in Sweden or Westfalia Separator in the then West Germany, the latter producing a centrifugal separator which was an undoubted advance in production quality, I recall my father’s real interest and excitement with every such development. Rightly or wrongly, Irish people believed that what came from Europe was likely to be an improvement on older methods, and most people in the dairy industry were examining the knowledge and expertise that had already been put in place in the post-war recovery period.
Monaghan Co-Op introduced the first biodegradable Tetrapak milk-carton to Ireland, long before its Tetra-brick successor swept the market. Not alone had the shape of the carton to be decided – the tetrahedron-shaped precursor pack, the oblong Tetrabrik, or the slightly flatter rectangular pack – but design was also to the fore. Every so often throughout his career, my father had varied the design of butter wrappers and milk packaging, which created great debate in our household as we examined the options in a world largely untouched by the handhold of the advertising behemoths.
Eventually though, working with an advertising firm brought one of the great coups, with the creation of the Champion Milk brand, directly after Clones featherweight boxer Barry McGuigan won the world championship gold medal, fighting Eusebio Pedroza in London. With county morale at an all-time high, to scoop the idea of the “champion” and append it to Monaghan dairy products seemed obvious. Today, Champion Butter and Milk survives, and the word “champion” has acquired its own unique vibration, although McGuigan’s career has evolved in different directions since those heady times.
It’s a long way from La Maison du Beurre in St Malo or Rennes, but the story of Irish butter – less diverse than its French product – echoes many food-related stories on one small island on the edge of Europe. In Monaghan today, milk supply amounts to 500 million litres annually. Behind all the statistics though, what I remember from childhood is entering the dairy to watch the ooze of thick primrose-yellow butter coiling from the gigantic churns into butter boxes, the air filled with the odour of sweetness, of clover, of cleanliness and rural enterprise.