We might as well go ahead and admit it: There are moments when it seems as though The Scrapbook and the New York Times inhabit different universes. This happens with increasing frequency—and not just when we confront those blast-furnace editorials or the rank opinionizing in its news columns. The other day we got the feeling reading the Times’s (usually wonderful) food section.
An item appeared there under the headline “An Old-fashioned Route to Butter.” Our admittedly modern route to butter takes us to the local grocery store, where a spectacular exfoliation of options beckons from the dairy case: salted or unsalted, cultured or grass-fed, foreign or domestic, fake or real, in tubs, sticks, or (horrifyingly) a squeezable pouch.
The route the Times takes to butter, on the other hand, travels through time. The item advised readers to buy a hand-powered churn and make their own butter. We were disoriented from the first sentence. “Yes, you can make butter in a food processor . . . ” You can? The thought had never occurred to us. But now that it has, it sounds super messy.
Wrong, says the Times: Churning your own butter by hand “has much more aesthetic appeal.” Really? The churn pictured in the article has no aesthetic appeal; it looks like a Rube Goldberg-style hand crank attached to a mason jar. “Using two quarts of heavy cream,” continues the Times, “one can make more than a pound of golden butter, along with a bonus: several cups of buttermilk.”
The Scrapbook has led a long life; we’ve been around the block a few times. And never, ever, have we encountered a human being who would consider a single cup of buttermilk, much less several, a “bonus.” Other words come to mind: yucky, revolting, and vomitous are the top three.
“Imagine a weekend morning,” the Times continues cheerfully, “with the family making butter, buttermilk and then the pancakes.” Of course, by then it will be time for lunch, not to mention the inevitable bickering over who will be forced to clean the churn.
The Times is a “progressive” paper, but its lifestyle advice is often retrograde. For centuries, churning butter ranked with milking cows and mucking out barns as an odious domestic chore—a chore, moreover, performed by women. The demise of the churn was a landmark in the liberation of our sisters and daughters and mothers from lives of drudgery. What’s next—telling them to run down to the creek and clean the long johns by beating them on rocks?
And conservatives are supposed to be the ones who want to turn back the clock.
