The butter nut

FOR A NUMBER of years, the "mid-'90s" seemed like just a few years ago, but suddenly it is the mid-naughts (is that a polite term?), and an eventful decade now separates us from that golden time. Among the many reasons to be nostalgic about 1995, one, for me, stands taller than the rest: 89¢-a-pound butter. Yes, butter was almost continuously on sale then – sweet butter, lightly salted butter – and, like some kind of pastry-crazed survivalist, I kept pounds and pounds of it in the freezer as insurance against the day when the price might skyrocket to $1.39 a pound. (Butter freezes brilliantly: yet another reason to love it.)

But I misgauged the skyrocketing, and at some point in the later '90s, it occurred to me that butter on sale at $1.69 a pound was as freezerworthy a price as I was likely to find in a town gone suddenly boom. These days ... well, I cannot really bear to cite too many figures, but $5 or $6 a pound doesn't seem unusual, blow-it-out-to-the-bare-walls specials are surpassingly rare, and the freezer space I once kept clear for the next great influx of butter is now a wasteland of the ragtag: Ziploc bags of forgotten nuts and dried peppers, a pint of sorbet dating to the end-stage Clinton era.

The DIY solution is less about saving money – though there is a chance of this – than about a certain satisfaction in doing something for oneself rather than buying a prepackaged version made in a factory somewhere, in conditions and according to standards we cannot see, for the financial benefit of shareholders we also cannot see. And making one's own butter is surely one of the easier ways to strike this chord of self-reliance. All you need, really, is heavy cream (organic, or the more nearly so the better) and some sort of churning apparatus. I use a stand mixer fitted with the whisk.

The procedure is straightforward: You whisk the cream at moderate speed. You will see it thicken, to soft peaks and then stiff peaks. Whip on and in a few more seconds you will see the cream's texture lose its velvetiness and become almost granular, with a slight yellowing of color. At this point splash in some well-chilled water (ice cubes in a pitcher of water work well), and the cream should immediately seize into butter. You then gather it up, squeeze out the buttermilk, rinse, and repeat a few times, then salt lightly if desired and shape into a log or block. If you have no immediate use for your butter, you can refrigerate it or even – space permitting! – freeze it,.