The Discovery of Butter

It’s likely that nomadic peoples in Asia were the first groups to discover how butter is made. Food historians attribute the creation of butter to these nomadic peoples because of circumstance. Butter requires churning, which would have been a natural action for a jug of milk attached to a horse. As the horse moved, the milk would have received a very light but thorough churning. After a long day in the saddle, it might be surprising to find your milk has turned into butter, but it wouldn’t be scientifically impossible. 

There is a Mongolian technique to churning butter. You add cream to a leather flask, and then suspend the flask from the ground. The flask is positioned horizontally and then the butter is slowly churned through natural movement. At some point, butter making was passed on to the Celts and Vikings, who in turn passed on a love of the substance to descendents. 

Butter has been a symbol of both fertility and purity since ancient times. It is a white substance, especially the clarified butter that is often skimmed off the top. We now know there is a link between the fats in butter and hormone production, with those natural fats being beneficial to women.

Surprisingly, butter was slow to hit Europe. The French didn’t use it often until well after the fifteenth century. Italy was also slow to adopt butter. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have much of a taste for it, and it didn’t catch on as a thickening agent until the Church framed rules for consumption of butter during the fourteenth century.