Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved margarine. I love its mild, slightly salty flavour; its eager spreadability; the merest hint of scent. My favourite brand is the perfect pale shade of yellow, as soothing as the walls of a newborn’s bedroom. It’s sold in cute square tubs that remind me of babies’ stacking cubes. I always have some in my fridge.
My favourite thing to do with margarine is spread it on a slice of homemade, toasted challah, cut slightly too thick so it pops out of the toaster with charred edges. I like to watch the marg melt into translucent nothingness, then add an opaque shmear of Vegemite on top.
The funny thing about admitting that you love margarine is not, I think, the peculiarity of loving margarine, but the question that is inevitably hitched to it: what about butter?
So, what about butter? Well, I basically grew up without it. This is going to sound weird, but ours was a margarine-only household. I don’t think it was a conscious decision; it certainly wasn’t due to austerity. Things just sort of evolved that way – partly for health-related reasons (remember how we were all terrified of saturated fat for 50 years?), and partly for kashrut reasons.
Kosher dietary laws prohibit the consumption of meat and dairy in the same meal, and stipulate specific waiting periods between the two categories. This distinction is so important that we have a specific word – and accompanying rules and practices, and sometimes even sets of dishes – to describe things that are neither dairy nor meat: pareve. Since most Shabbat and festive meals involve meat dishes, these rules present a challenge for the dessert course, which must exclude dairy.
Spreading margarine on toasted challah is a joy. Source: Desiree Nielsen
Now, Judaism precedes the invention of margarine by a few thousand years, and we have lots of wonderful non-dairy desserts. Honey cake, traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah, is oil-based, as are many flourless Passover chocolate cakes. Compote (Jews love stewed fruit) requires no dairy or oil at all. And many Sephardic and Mizrachi sweets (made by communities from the Levant, North Africa and the Middle East), such as halva, and bimuelos, are also dairy-free. The, one of the greatest vegan junk foods of all time, was invented by with his success. We’ve had a lot of time to sort this out.
But here’s the thing: you can’t make a classic Country Women’s Association “butter” cake or fluffy faux-buttercream icing with oil. Oil has limits. Oil has boundaries. But margarine doesn’t. Margarine is audacious in the best possible way, charmingly un-self-aware about its inferiority. Margarine has chutzpah. It will slide into a pan with eggs, mushrooms and kosher sausage for an indulgent brunch; it will luxuriously coat the inside of a fluffy roll for the kosher chicken banh mi you painstakingly make at home; it will make the Australian Women’s Weekly cricket cake requested by your nephew for his birthday barbecue a reality. Margarine makes kosher dreams come true, which is why it became the default standard in my childhood kitchen.
(I should clarify here that plenty of kosher kitchens are stocked with butter, even if it’s used less frequently. My late auntie Pearl always had a stick in a dedicated crock, which struck me as charmingly pastoral for Melbourne's .)
I’m not going to argue that margarine is better than butter. Margarine is to butter as instant coffee (which I also love) is to espresso. I simply think of – and the $1 drip coffee I drank almost every morning I lived in New York – as a coffee-flavoured beverage, and I apply that ethos to margarine. Both products are facsimiles, both are inferior… but so what? Why not? With a bit of radical acceptance, it’s possible to find them delicious for what they are. They aren’t authentic, but they are authentically themselves. Instant coffee and margarine have escaped Plato’s cave, and they’re dancing outside like nobody’s watching.
Margarine is to butter as instant coffee (which I also love) is to espresso.
This doesn’t mean I never ate butter growing up – I had it occasionally at cafes and friends’ homes. It was fun to open the tiny packets served with airline meals or at motel breakfasts. Wrapped up like a gift in gold foil, butter seemed cold, aristocratic, and unyielding – which only reinforced its foreignness. Culinary stars like and sang its praises on TV, but their dishes were so far removed from my world (, mon dieu), they might as well have been broadcasting from the moon.
Butter. Adults intoned the word – in the newspaper, on the radio, around the dinner table – reverently, guiltily, almost erotically, sometimes even as an admonition. I remember walking past the living room one evening in the '90s when my mother’s book club was gathered inside (picture a group of post-menopausal Jewish women eating fruit and cake, likely discussing Helen Garner) and hearing one of the Judys present exclaiming dramatically, “Oh, the butter!” to a clamorous response.
Around the same time, a TV commercial sponsored by Dairy Australia romanticised butter as a simple, wholesome, healthy product containing just one ingredient – cream – that required no sophisticated manufacturing. It was a deliberate attack on Big Marg, and I was not sold. No way was butter superior or healthier than margarine, I scoffed to myself, and surely it involved more than just cream.
But butter demanded respect, so I respected it, although respect doesn’t equal love. Its sweet-salty-fatty triple whammy simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed me. It was good and it was also too much. The smell of butter frying in a saucepan struck me as cloying. Croissants left me cold. Where I was accustomed to margarine’s pareve nothingness, butter asserted itself. My kosher palate couldn’t process it.
There are lots of wonderful non-dairy Jewish desserts – such as honey cake, traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah. Source: Alan Benson
Butter was Christmas, butter was hot cross buns, butter was white bread at a sausage sizzle at Bunnings. Butter was goyish Anglo-Aussie culture, and I was a Jewish kid on the outside looking in, eating my Vegemite challah sandwich. You could say I was the other in this scenario, but that’s not really accurate – the truth is, I othered butter. This was long before people talked about representation. The idea of someone appearing on Australian TV to talk about Jewish food for more than two minutes once or twice a year was as ludicrous to me then as it would have been to a TV producer.
And so my palate was shaped, unapologetically, by milquetoast margarine. I’ve put it in everything: casseroles, scrambled eggs, , “creamy” pasta sauces, and – most importantly – cakes, biscuits and slices. The baking arena is where margarine really excels. In many recipes, it produces a more neutral flavour and lighter mouthfeel, allowing other ingredients – say, a tart summer plum or a luxurious nut – to shine. You can make a very respectable, fluffy, moreish icing. I actually think some biscuits have more structural integrity when made with margarine, due to the chemistry of the fat component.
But what I appreciate most about margarine is its versatility and inclusivity – with margarine I can make a cake that’s kosher, dairy-free and (with the right egg substitute) vegan, catering to a range of dietary requirements and friends. Picture me at a birthday party, joyously handing out cupcakes with Oprah-like enthusiasm: “You get a cupcake. You get a cupcake! Everybody’s getting a cupcake!”
A good dollop of butter is key to scrambled eggs. Source: Adam Liaw
My favourite kosher brand, , has a challah motif on the packaging – not so much a wink to its demographic as a loud “shalom” beckoning from the end of the dairy aisle, vaguely embarrassing, like running into your bat mitzvah teacher at the gym. In seven years in New York, I never found a product to rival it, despite vegan and kosher consumer markets that are exponentially larger than those in Australia.
But what I appreciate most about margarine is its versatility and inclusivity – with margarine I can make a cake that’s kosher, dairy-free and (with the right egg substitute) vegan, catering to range of dietary requirements and friends.
Indeed, its history is rooted in local Melbourne Jewish geography – my post-war shtetl. For decades, it was manufactured in Windsor, where a generation of Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors established schmatte factories and other businesses. , who grew the brand into the post-WWII success story it is today, lived in Elsternwick, the suburb I grew up in and reside in now, which has a significant Jewish population (and about a dozen places to buy bagels and challah on which to shmear your margarine).
I’m on much better terms with butter these days – I finally started eating it when I moved out of home in my mid-twenties. It only takes a couple of roommates looking at you funny when you say you don’t eat butter to realise you’d better get smart about it, and fast. My palate has matured. I bake with it pretty regularly, and I usually have a stick of something local and salted in a crock on my counter. I still don’t love the smell of butter frying, but I do enjoy a pat in a baked potato or spread across some tangy, bouncy sourdough. I’ve discovered that crumbling butter into flour for a galette is equivalent to one therapy session, and about one-thirtieth of the cost. And yes, I’ve now sampled my fair share of treyf, because life is for living, and if God exists, I don’t think they care about that one time I ate a Reuben in Brooklyn (reader: it was good).
But my kitchen at home is kosher; I live close to my family again once again; and losses both tiny and incomprehensibly immense have drawn me back to my childhood in recent years, in more ways than I can explain here. In my little house, there’s always a tub of Nuttelex in the fridge. When I’m heartbroken, grieving or sick, there’s nothing so comforting as sinking a knife into that giving spread and watching it melt onto the surface of some challah.
There's a delight in smearing butter across a tangy slice of sourdough.
A few years ago my sister sent me a video of my niece, then a toddler, playing on the floor of their living room. Clothed in just a tiny green gingham apron and a single matching oven mitt, she points at a range of toys and imagined foods in front of her, describing the menu for a future meal. “Cakes, ice cream, margarine, cakes and pancakes,” she squeakily intones. For a while, we couldn’t work out if she was saying “mandarine” or “margarine”, until I spotted it in the foreground: a sliver of an empty kosher Nuttelex tub, almost indistinguishable from the other toys.
This piece was originally submitted for , a project dedicated to promoting diverse voices on food.
The bright side of butter (and margarine)
Jewish honey cake (lekach)
