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.”

Khosrova already had a soft spot for dairy; she’d founded a specialty cheese magazine in 2008. But butter was unplumbed terrain for her, and as she began to delve deeper, she realized that its cultural legacy had been overlooked in culinary literature, too. She began work on Butter: A Rich History, an ode to butter’s enduring role in civilization. From the Vedic Aryans of India, who “sprinkled melted butter on the flames of a bonfire to make them leap and crackle” as they worshipped their fire god, to ancient Ireland, where Druids “buried butter in the bog as an offering to the fairies,” butter has enjoyed a revered role in society for millennia.

Only the Romans were disdainful, believing it to be the food of barbarians. As butter lost its religious symbolism, it assumed economic clout. Internationally traded by the Irish, Dutch and the Danish, the creamy fat also became an integral component in French and American cuisine. But by the 1960s, butter’s fortunes waned as scientists and governmental agencies vilified animal fats in a misguided effort to combat heart disease. Only now is it beginning to reemerge from beneath this cloud of stigma, helped in part by a backlash against margarine, its chief competitor. As Khosrova notes, “the epidemic of obesity and diabetes has many people questioning the low-fat, no-fat advice they’ve been given for decades.”

With butter fashionable again, aspiring connoisseurs have an abundance of varieties to choose from. Khosrova recommends sampling different brands side by side to appreciate their subtle differences; she also suggests investing in pricier grass-fed butters. Tempted to slather it on a baguette for your taste test? Resist the urge: You’ll be surprised at the flavors you uncover when you try butter on its own.