In Praise of Butter

Elaine Khosrova never intended to write an entire book on butter. A former pastry chef and food writer, her first exposure to butter’s wide-ranging properties came when she was assigned to a butter tasting. “I hadn’t expected to experience such a range of color, flavor and texture among the 12 or so samples, ” she recalls. “Knowing butter is essentially made from a simple process of agitation using just one ingredient—cream—I couldn’t account for why there was such variation.”