Spreading the word on spreading the mix
My prankster mate Barney tossed a question in my direction recently. “Name something that spreads well,” he said. “A gossip?” I inquired, straight-faced. But Barney, a master prankster when it comes to pulling someone else’s legs, doesn’t quite like his own being pulled. Privately, I think he’s fearful of digressing from a serious thought (whenever he has one) in case he loses the thread of what he wants to say. So, in a serious moment, he’d prefer to stay serious even if all around him choose banter as an escape.
No, not a gossip, he assured me, advising me at the same time to “stop for once thinking outside the square” and “stay within the box”. Because, he added, this spreader that he had in mind usually came in a box. And after all that roundabout circumlocution I discovered that what he had in mind was “butter”. (In Australia, it’s almost universally pronounced “budder” and even “bud-ah” which reminds me of the time two young Indians attempted to order a sandwich and the young Aussie woman at the sandwich counter asked routinely, “Bud-ah”? To which the two men inquired if the sandwiches were sold “budah” [big] and “chota” [small]. Which in turn perplexed the sandwich maker, resulting in a round of hilarity.)
Anyhow, Barney on this occasion asked if I had been ‘budder trained’ as a kid. I honestly had no idea what he was on about. What is butter training? I asked of him, and he in turn informed me that just as with so many things in life there was a certain etiquette to be followed when it came to butter. Apparently, you hold the butter knife at an angle of roughly 45 degrees to the butter (or margarine). Then with gentle, delicate swishing strokes you elegantly scraped the required quantity of butter which, of course, you then proceeded to lather your slice of toast with.
The perfect angle
Only … the toast-lathering had an etiquette of its own: you didn’t just dollop the butter in the middle of the toast and spread roughly. You did place the butter in the centre, but after that you proceeded to level it out in all directions of the compass, levelling and levelling until you reached the very extent (the boundary limits) of each slice. In other words, no part of the bread was to be left ignored, or unbuttered. Barney says his earliest attempts to butter bread as a kid were akin to those of a practised miner — that is, the butter ended up with a series of holes that looked like something preparatory to an excavation. Which, in turn, made his fussy mother extremely fussed.
“Many’s the time she actually held my hand with the butter knife until I acquired the perfect angle,” he informed me. A part of me wondered if that was taking parenting to an extreme, but not being the judgemental type, I banished such thoughts. To each his own, is my motto. Did my mum impart similar training, he inquired. And I, in my turn, laughed aloud despite myself. Butter was never an essential commodity at the dining table, I informed him.
My parents, who kind of severed ties with British tradition when they chose to remain in India, did the right thing in choosing not to try to be too British in an independent India. They adopted the Indian cuisine lock stock and barrel, so a butter dish if we as children ever saw one, was only on a rare occasion. Other times, we got to see that other spreader: “dosa”[Indian pancake] mix. My gran was a great spreader of the mixture and she made some excellent, crispy dosas, a skill she passed on to her daughters. My mum would put heaps of dosas on the table but she didn’t give a toss if we adopted any etiquette on how the jolly things should be eaten. But for some reason, I’d like to try my hand at buttering toast just to see if I’m doing it right.