Das Butter Buch

First published in 1979 by the Zentralverband schweiz. Milchproduzenten, Bern, (the association of Swiss milk producers), the butter book is described as:

Eine Fülle von Rezepten, Tips, Bastel- und Spielideen für das ganze Jahr.
A wealth of recipes, tips, craft and game ideas for the whole year.

And, perhaps it goes without saying, one with a strong emphasis on butter.

The book is laid out month by month:

Each month features a selection of recipes (everything from cheese soufflé to sweetbreads), crafts, household tips (how to transport cut flowers, how to freeze mushrooms), horoscopes, fun facts, poems and riddles (En gäle Butterball, wo alli Tag schmilzt und doch immer glich rund bliibt—a yellow butterball that melts every day but always stays perfectly round), and beauty and diet tips (numb your eyebrows with ice before you pluck them! Want to be fit for the summer? Try quark! Need a beauty treatment? Buttermilk baths!)

Another great feature in the book is the section: Heute Kochen die Kinder (today the kids cook), with easy recipes for little helpers (and some more complicated ones, like chocolate mousse).

Throughout the book you can certainly feel the presence of the milk lobby, with recipes that heavily feature dairy—butter, yogurt, cream, quark, milk—as well as facts peppered throughout. Page 28 and 29 contain a whole spread on Wissenwertes über Milch (facts to know about milk), page 63 features a Kleine Butterkunde, more facts about butter, (or as one translation program suggested, Butterology), and page 123 is a celebration of Rahm, cream.

The recipes are, of course, seasonal and a mix of classic (Zopf, Wähe, all the Swiss Christmas cookies…) to modern (for the time).

As you would expect from the 70s and 80s, there are recipes for shrimp cocktail, devilled eggs, filled avocado (plus tips on growing your own), escargot, and even Scotch eggs.

I love the recipes with proper names—Yvonne, Ariane, Kaiserin Elisabeth (all salads), Cosimo (a liver dish), Vanessa (an asparagus gratin), Leopold (a soup) and Mireille (tomatoes). And my favourite of all is the children’s hamburger that is dubbed ‘Beefy’.

Each chapter also provides a birthday cake—which is then loosely linked to that month’s astrological sign. Scorpios like me are described as “undurchschaubare und nicht leicht zufriedenzustellende” (inscrutable and not easily satisfied) and the suggested cake is a Bananen-Quark-Torte. “Critical” Virgos (like my husband), need something that will really delight, so the suggested cake is a Vacherin Glacé, an elaborate ice cream cake with piped meringue. The king of the zodiac, Leo, gets a kingly cake—Black Forest, while friendly Taurus needs a big cake to share with all their friends.

My favourite recipe from the whole book has to be the New Yorker Lady-Lunch, which involves removing the fruit from a grapefruit, mixing it with quark, herbs and salt and pepper and filling it back into the empty grapefruit. And that’s the whole lunch.

I tried recipes from the month of April—the easy recipe was Omelette Bolognese (crepes filled with bolognese and topped with cheese), the Ariane salad (endives and oranges), an excellent rhubarb cake and more crepes with a quark filling. All recipes were total crowd-pleasers and received thumbs up from my “critical” husband, my 7-year old daughter, and my Swiss mother.

The Verdict:

If you see this book in a Brocki—definitely pick it up!