Better Buy a Ball of Butter

     My mom never made cheese. She never knew what it was like. But she did make a lot of butter and ghee from the milk leftover after we had supplied the neighborhood. Free home delivery was our responsibility. We kids did it well without causing any concern for customer care or ultimately our bossy mom.  We raised chickens, goats, rabbits, and cattle. We also grew a fair share of our own food, like edible leaves, veggies, and tubers, mostly annuals but also perennials. Everybody contributed towards the labor, therefore we hardly ever needed to hire a farmhand.

There was no such thing as waste on our homestead. In fact, there is no such thing as organic waste on this planet we call home. Mom boiled the unsold milk and let it cool off. She then added a little buttermilk as culture and kept it overnight for turning the earthen milk pot into a pot of buttermilk. Once she was free from farm chores, she would sit back to churn the curds into little scattered butter islands surfacing on a turbulent milky sea.

 Persuading these butter islands to form a ball and then produce a sizeable amount of butter requires great manoeuvering skill, which is not easily masterable. I would lend my pair of hands to turn the wooden churner when Mom’s hands got tired from churning. But I never tried to learn how to do it on my own. We seldom sold the butter. Instead, we treated ourselves to it for breakfast as a dipping sauce for hot, straight-from-the-oven “Kattippathiri”, which is a thick, round rice bread rolled flat placed on a piece of a banana frond.

My eyes caught hold of a few golden butter balls on display last week. I was on a regular stroll around the Tuesday market in Abha. I think I had seen them there before, but they had never reminded me so vividly of my own roots before. Here are some for you to savor while I revisit the butter days of my pastoral past.