A soft spot for butter

This morning — every day that I can — I sliced four pieces of homemade honey wheat berry bread and dropped them in the toaster. Two cycles later they were crisp, brown and ready for butter time.

Butter in the morning, butter in the evening and butter at suppertime. If there isn’t a song, there should be.

Sweet butter or salted — I’m not sure you can go wrong. Sweet is sweet and sounds like it was churned in a silver pail by a healthy woman in a red apron. Sweet butter is as sweet as it gets.

No need to make a case for salted butter. Salt tastes good on its own and add it to butter and it tastes better and it’s not easy for butter to taste better because butter is born better.

I took the round ceramic top off the butter dish, something I do when my hands are dry and as far from being butter hands as they can be. I’m afraid I may drop the top, which is blue and vaguely French, and shatter it and ruin somebody’s morning.

I’d rather not do that around something as life-affirming as butter, topped only by the experience of spreading it on top of four slices of homemade honey wheat berry bread.

I pick up the top of the round butter dish and place it on the counter without bouncing, chipping or breaking it. Then I take the butter knife with the wooden handle and the generous spreading area we bought from L.L. Bean about 25 years ago and plunge it into the stick of butter.

There are two philosophies of the butter plunge — go wide or go narrow and dainty. Wide says, “I’m going to get enough butter on this knife to service my toast and your toast too.” Dainty and slivery-thin means you’re coming back for more.

Wide or dainty, the important thing, the buttery elephant in the room, is the butter be soft. In order for the butter to be soft, the butter has to spend its limited lifespan, limited in households where butter is like liquid oxygen and a stick may last two days but three is out of the question, as far from the fridge as possible.

What can you do with hard butter? Salty or sweet? Go ahead and try using it.

If you do, what happens is you make grooves in your toast and perhaps even tear the fabric of the toast. You might as well be plowing the back 40 with a dull plow except in this case, the back 40 is your beloved brown breakfast toast and hard butter the plow.

Hard butter doesn’t melt easily. It sits there, all ridges and corners as if to say, I resist your efforts to make me your own, a willing accomplice to your dastardly breakfast plans.

Soft butter people have a nose for hard butter and there’s nothing more dispiriting than being at a restaurant when they bring the shallow butter dish filled with pats of butter that are harder than a stack of wooden nickels. What are you supposed to do to soften them up: Breath on them hard, palm them or pass them back and forth from one hand to another?

It’s easier to eat it without butter, which is like a day without buttery sunshine.

Soft butter is different and it’s a welcomer rather than a keeper-awayer. This requires leaving it on the counter all the time, which doubles as a way of remembering what season you’re in.

In December and January, the butter is firm, pliable during the spring months and in the warmer months, like a teenager, the butter can barely stand up straight and is hard to transfer from knife to toast, omelet pan or baked potato.

The butter wants to lie down. Stretch out. Make the rough smooth and the hard soft.