An Irishman's Diary

I MUST admit it was rather cheering to read that story (page 8, World News, yesterday) about the butter shortage in Norway. Into every oil-rich country a little rain must fall, it seems. And although it's not exactly hardship, the image of empty shelves in pre-Christmas Oslo did add just a tinge of compassion to my Schadenfreude. The threat posed to an important Norwegian yuletide tradition – the baking of "seven kinds of buttery cakes" – tugged at my heartstrings too.

Would it be too late to send humanitarian supplies, I wonder? After all, it’s not like we’d have to give the stuff away. The locals are well able to pay for it, and willing too. According to another report I read, black market butter prices have quadrupled and one man selling half a kilo of butter was offered 3,000 kroner (about €375) for it. At rates like that, we could help ease human suffering in both Norway and Ireland simultaneously.

Their dairying crisis apart, it’s hard not to feel envious of modern Norwegians, now that Kerrygold is the only thing we have that they don’t. This is all the more annoying because for much of their history, they were just like us. Poor and agricultural, they were even the butt of dumb-Norwegian jokes, as told by richer neighbours to the east.

Even more impressively, the fact that they had ready-made enemies in the Swedes notwithstanding, they also managed to have a chip on their shoulders about England. Maybe this is reading too much into a single outburst by one football commentator 30 years ago, on the occasion of Norway inflicting a World Cup qualifier defeat on the Three Lions. But even so. It’s a very famous piece of oratory, rivalling for passion anything ever to come out of the soccer fields of Latin America.

When the commentator greeted the final whistle by mocking a who’s who of English greatness – “Lord Nelson! Lord Beaverbrook! Sir Winston Churchill! Sir Anthony Eden! Clement Attlee! Henry Cooper! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher – can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher? Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!” – you felt he was speaking for a nation.

Such an effusion would hardly happen now, after decades of oil-flow have smoothed out most of Norway’s neuroses (except for the odd madman with a gun). Many Swedes work for the Norwegians these days. So do formerly mighty Icelanders. Nor is there any chance of the oil-based power drying up soon. They found another massive offshore field in October. So now they’re even more immune from the euro-zone crisis.

Their biggest worry, I’m told, is that they might get lazy. That’s the problem with new-found wealth: it does tend to bring a certain decadence, as we found here. And laziness may or may not be a factor in the butter shortage. But along with bad summer weather, the supply-demand imbalance is also blamed on the high-fat low-carb diet which is now all the rage in Norway. That would be the decadence kicking in, I reckon.

SPEAKING OFbuttery cakes, if not of diets, food historians among you may be aware of a very strange recipe that was once popular in Ireland, especially at Christmas. It was a dish known, in short, as "roasted butter". And yes, it sounds like an Irish joke. But the recipe is referred to in several quite serious books, including the venerable Oxford Companion to the Year.

It did indeed involve putting butter (a pound of it, typically, covered with breadcrumbs) on a spit, and turning it slowly in front of a fire – albeit a very low fire. Then, as the butter began dripping, more breadcrumbs or oatmeal were added, and so on. The compound was also basted with egg yolks to keep it together, and there might have been nutmeg involved too, for flavour.

In some cases, the result was used as a mere topping for oysters. But in others, the roasted butter cake was considered just that – a cake – and eaten in slices. The English author of a cook book from 1750 mentions a “certain Irish woman” of his acquaintance who had baked 27 separate pounds of the stuff for Christmas in a single house, where guests ate the lot in slices, “as we do cakes and mince pies”.

Perhaps, as with the Scalteen mentioned here recently, the secret of why roasted butter cake tasted so good may be irrevocably lost to modern generations. Now, it sounds like just an elaborate way to melt butter and mix breadcrumbs in it and you wonder why they bothered. But one possible explanation is that, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, butter was a more complex dairy product than it is today. More like cheese, maybe.

Either way, the recipe for roasted butter may be another small thing we have to make Norwegians envious. On which note, if there are any Norse readers out there wondering why Irish people, then or now, would ever have gone to the trouble of baking 27lbs of butter (with an estimated Oslo Street value of 80,000 kroner), my answer is this: because we could.