by Ron James

Created on: October 25, 2010

I love butter. I mean real, honest to goodness, the way the gods intended it to be butter. Not that cheap imitation foisted off on the world by a French chemist, but the real stuff that comes from real milk produced by real cows.

Considering that when I was born, the greasy, pasty white substitute (you had to dye it yellow yourself) was actually illegal in my home state, it's small wonder I have such an affection for the real thing. 

All that said, there is one thing about butter that I don't like: fresh from the refrigerator, it's impossible to spread. Or so I thought until I rediscovered a “lost” technology from days gone by – the butter crock. 

The butter crock is a device that originated, oddly enough, in the same place that spawned butter's unworthy stand-in. When it debuted in France in the late 19th century, it went by various names, including Beurrier à l'eau", "Beurrier Breton", "Beurrier Normand", and "Cloche de beurre." Some people say that the concept is much older, dating back to the Middle Ages and undergoing periodic “revivals” as new generations rediscovered the old methods. When American potters began producing and marketing the old-timey, new-fangled gadget at craft fairs and such in the 1970s and '80s, they just called it a French Butter Dish or a Butter Crock. 

(Today, the contrivance is commonly called a “Butter Bell.” However, it should be noted that “Butter Bell” is a registered trademark of L. Tremain, Inc., a leading manufacturer of butter crocks. The practice of calling the product a “butter bell” is somewhat like calling a facial tissue a “Kleenex” or a sterile adhesive bandage a “Band-Aid.”)

The design is simple. The butter crock consists of two parts: a hollow cylindrical base into which water is poured, and a cup – usually bell-shaped – that contains the butter and also serves as a lid. 

So how does it work? The concept is as simple as the design. 

Butter has been around for a very long time, right? Refrigeration has not. So how did people keep butter fresh in the days before refrigeration? They employed various incarnations of the butter crock. 

You see, temperature is not the real enemy of butter's creamy freshness. Oxygen is. So before there were refrigerators – or even ice boxes – fresh butter was stored in earthenware pots. Somewhere along the line, somebody figured out that

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