by Ari Weinzweig

“When your teeth hit the bread, the butter better be hitting your gums.” – Ivan Allen

Farmers, Firkins, Fairies, Fair Trade & Full Flavor

I’ll not forget my first trip to Ireland. I went over, on my own and knowing no one there, in June of 1989. Although I can’t say I could tell at the time it was happening, that first visit was the start of a lifelong love affair with the place. I’m not really at all sure why it happened. I suppose in truth it doesn’t really matter—the thing is that it did. I guess that’s usually the way that sort of stuff unfolds. Whether you’re knowingly ready or not, something clicks and you find yourself, planned or not, with a connection that works, one that continues to build as you get to know more of the details and the depth behind the initial experience.

Since this essay is about butter, it’d be convenient to tell you that that was the driving force behind my attraction to the Emerald Isle. But in truth, at the time butter was barely even on my list. It is on there now though; as can happen with any long time lover, the initial thrill of the first encounter has long since passed but you continue to find small, significant stuff you love about your love. Sometimes the things you come upon later on actually turn out to be more meaningful than what got you going so good in the first place. That’s where I’d put butter in the context of Ireland and I. I barely thought anything of it when I first got to the island. Today it’s regularly but very real treat—eating a thick slice of Irish Brown Soda bread from the Bakehouse spread with Irish cultured butter is a really amazing, so, so simple, soooo, soooo good that . . . you might find your attentions and affections drawn toward the Irish by bread and butter alone.

While I’m on the subject of butter, and before I go back into history—my own and Ireland’s—I should tell you that in a way that I’ve not seen anywhere else in the world Irish people love their butter. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that when you bring butter to the table Irish people get a glow about them in a way kids over here would do when you bring a bowl of ice cream. By contrast, butter here in the States seems to make a lot of people nervous; we hide the fact that we like it, or ask for more almost apologetically. Irishmen may, I’m sure, watch their weight as we do, but they don’t seem to let that slow down their beer drinking nor their butter eating in the least. I should have known that butter in Ireland was a different thing when, on my first visit to Ballymaloe House, the late Ivan Allen shared an Irish saying with me. “When your teeth hit the bread,” Ivan said with this huge smile and ironic Irish twinkle, “the butter better be hitting your gums.”

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