Butter factors into my own family’s folklore. My mother likes to tell the story of when she found me as a toddler, sitting on the kitchen floor, eating a stick of butter I had somehow finagled from the fridge. Later I married into a French family whose motto is “le beurre, c’est la vie” (butter is life). In fact, France is the planet’s biggest annual butter consumer (nearly 18 pounds per person), and the country is revered for its butter-making prowess. In A Little Tour in France, Henry James wrote, “it was the poetry of butter, and I ate a pound or two of it.” Julia Child, the American champion of French cuisine, famously quipped, “with enough butter, anything is good.”