What kind of gourmet are you?

You may find this funny (or gross, or both) but one of my favorite snacks is a Town House cracker topped with a wafer-thin slice of very cold Plugra® or President® salted butter.

I have loved butter ever since I was a child. My mother would go to the dairy about three miles from our house to buy fresh butter, cream, and milk when I was a tot, and I learned very quickly that butter and cream were two of my favorite things.

When I was a child, my family would go out to eat every Friday night...same restaurant every Friday night. They served wonderful dinner rolls and they came with a bowl full of butter pats...a 1/2 tablespoon of butter situated atop a square waxed card, topped with a square of waxed parchment. I was so enamored of butter that I would swipe as many of the pats as I could manage, peeling back the top paper and eating the butter off the card much like a child would eat the frosting out of an Oreo® cookie. I can still eat butter with nothing else...though it doesn't have quite the appeal that it did when I was younger.

I have a hangup about butter, though...I don't really like my butter soft (in France, they would say "tender" butter); I like it cold so that it doesn't melt into bread, because melting the butter takes some of the flavor away that butter has when it is cold. Call me bizarre, but this is my psyche when it comes to butter.

My mother always used to caution me not to overbeat whipping cream because it would separate and turn to butter. My thought was, "why worry about that? It would be butter...it couldn't be bad." Uh, after I did it once, I decided that making butter was something better left to the dairy.

So now what kind of a gourmet do you think I am? I must say in my own defense that I am a butter snob...the European butters have a cleaner, fresher taste than U.S. butter, and so I am hooked.