30th November 2025
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Give women a truly good piece of butter ...
and history is made.
Anaïs Causse, owner of Maître Philippe & Filles, is one of those people who, when you ring her with a quick question about butter, ends up preparing a full tasting experience.
Last Week’s Delights
It was supposed to be one of those well-behaved weeks: wrapping up my notes from my last trip to Sweden while preparing for the next one—which, mind you, starts in just a few days. In other words: quiet writing and research time in my little cave, punctuated by visits to my favorite cafés so I don’t drift entirely into hermithood.
But then, as so often, one thing led to another. One evening I’m leafing through Ned Palmer’s chapter “The Birth of a Brand” (Stichelton, of course), which sends me down the trail of the Cheese Riot, which in turn leads me to the infamous Butter Incident (see Cheese Trivia!)—and suddenly butter has claimed a very prominent place on my weekly agenda.
The final push came from a wonderfully brisk documentary by our colleague and cheese luminary Will Studd: “Traditional Cultured Butter.” In it, he praises Échiré butter from the Charente region as the true icon of baking—even over its Norman counterpart. Really? “A slightly brittle texture, lower moisture content and higher smoke point,” he enthuses. And just like that, I found myself deep in the butter rabbit hole.
Would Will Studd win the arguement with Dana Canal about the best French butter for pastries?
I immediately sought the expertise of my friend Dana Canal, a viennoiserie specialist trained under Alejandro Guerra. After countless trial runs, she relies exclusively on AOP-certified Isigny butter from Normandy for her laminated doughs. Its characteristic profile—golden pigmentation, delicately nutty aromatics, and an unusually plastic yet stable fat structure—stems from the mineral-rich coastal climate and from the milk produced in the Baie des Veys and the marshlands of the Marais du Cotentin et du Bessin nature reserve.
The AOP specifications require that the cows graze on pasture for at least seven months a year. This beta-carotene-rich fresh forage not only increases the proportion of mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids, but also optimizes the crystallization of the milk fat—crucial for foldability, lamination performance, and temperature tolerance. Pastry chefs therefore prize Isigny butter for its exceptionally fine melt and its remarkably uniform plasticity across a wide processing range.
As Dana waves the butter block before me like a miniature stadium wave, she sums it up neatly: “I’ve tested so many butters—even excellent regional ones. None holds its flexible structure across such a broad temperature window. With Isigny butter, my viennoiseries stay fresh for hours, don’t seep fat, and never turn sticky.”
Just one tiny second when Dana isn’t out there waving butter like a flag.
Will and Dana would certainly have had plenty to discuss at this point. And after all that butter content, my own appetite was stirred—for the simplest and most honest of cravings: good butter with good bread. In that exact order, because what some might view as a questionable priority I consistently refer to as: focus on the fat.
So I called my trusted cheesemonger, Maître Philippe & Filles, to get an update on the current butter situation. By chance, Anaïs picked up herself. “Anaïs, I need good butter,” I said—and she only had to mention the name Christian Janier to set in motion a long-overdue espresso date and a dedicated butter debrief.
Anyone who knows Anaïs knows that a coffee is never just a coffee. She—whose fine-food shop has a reputation far beyond the city limits—promptly assembled an entire tasting. After the espresso—now fully alert—we dove into the raw-milk butter of Christian Janier, arguably the most renowned French affineur alongside Bernard Antony. Maître Philippe & Filles sources a significant portion of its selection from this Lyonnaise institution since over twenty years. And so, a few minutes later, I also found myself enjoying a geotrichum-dusted, full-bodied soft goat cheese, a creamy-earthy Camembert with a faintly sweet edge, and a Comté whose flavor profile hovers precisely between pear-like fruitiness and gentle nuttiness.
Anaïs and I agree that among the three versions, the salted one is our favorite.
Then back to the butter: Nils, one of the knowledgeable staff members, sliced fresh sourdough baguette from Keit Bakery and presented us with three variations of buttery perfection—unsalted, salted, and salted with crystals. Naturally, Anaïs invoked Loriot at this point: “A life without butter is possible, but pointless.”
The butter before us—a Beurre baratté from the Deux-Sèvres département—is produced entirely by hand at the Janier house, now in its fifth generation. The cream is churned in a traditional barrel (baratté) and sourced from a picturesque, agriculture-rich region of western France. Christian Janier works closely with the dairy farmers of the Deux-Sèvres. Neither milk nor cream is pasteurized; instead of industrial butirateurs, stainless-steel barrels are used, in which the butter is stirred slowly and evenly. The process is time-intensive, technically meticulous, and culminates in the malaxage—the patient kneading that gives the butter its remarkable suppleness and its distinctly fine aromatic profile.
“Fine” is almost an understatement. I appreciate high-quality raw-milk butter in general, but this one establishes an entirely different sensory benchmark. As we happily eat “butter with bread,” Jens serves us a small selection of cheese, salami, and antipasti. Not necessary by any means, but perfectly in tune with this generous, almost Mediterranean hospitality.
Thank you, Nils!
Along the way, Anaïs recounts a slightly absurd influencer trend from a few years back: raw-milk butter, blended into shakes by the liter, was hailed as the ultimate health elixir. Janier’s butter practically flew off the shelves. We both agree that among the three versions, the salted one is our favorite.
And so, despite planning only a quick meet-up, we sit together far longer than intended, basking in a state of advanced butter bliss. And proving, almost incidentally: Give women a good piece of butter … and great things happen.
Cheesy Trivia: When an angry woman gets butter in her hands, …
…history takes a wonderfully messy turn. On 4 October 1766, just two days after the now-famous Nottingham Cheese Riot of 2 October 1766 had crowds flinging cheese and shouting down outrageous prices at the Goose Fair, Ashby-de-la-Zouch staged its own dairy-driven encore. There, an elderly woman—thoroughly exasperated by sky-high butter prices—ended a heated argument with a farmer by grabbing a whole pound of butter and smearing it all over his face, surely one of the most spectacularly literal attempts at “buttering someone up” ever documented. Her buttery rebellion makes it clear that the chaotic cheese scenes in Nottingham were no isolated incident; in the autumn of 1766, the entire region seemed only one bad price tag away from turning everyday foodstuffs into weapons of public protest.
New Cheese Stories on the Board
To add a touch of Scandinavian freshness to all this buttery bliss, I’d like to point you to a piece that went live on my website this week—featuring the wonderful Eirný Sigurðardóttir, the Iceland Cheese Queen herself, and a devoted butter connoisseuse in her own right.
Whether Thomas Berglund—whom I visited just a few days ago at Almnäs Bruk in Hjo—also belongs to Team “Butter with Bread” is something I unfortunately forgot to ask. I simply couldn’t; I was in a kind of trance. Why?
I’ll take my leave here before the self-inflicted whirlwind of bliss that awaits in the coming days catches up with me. On Friday, the first meeting of my upcoming cheese journey is already on the agenda—none other than Rory Mellis. At least one thing is certain: until then, I am superbly supplied in the butter department.
Don’t forget: Great things take time.
Yours truly, Laura