>>56141
I guess you could mix margarine with Vegemite(tm), but I am not sure I want to know how it would taste.
Please furgive me fur rambling. I'm in one of those moods.
Long ago, and I am recounting stories told to me by now-deceased relatives who lived through the Depression, margarine was sold in stores as an inexpensive substitute fur what they habitually called "real butter" the rest of their lives. "Butter" was the term they used fur margarine and "real butter" was the expensive stuff they'd buy fur special occasions, or not, if they'd just seen something on TV about the dangers of cholesterol.
But, see. Ninety years ago some people called margarine "counterfeit butter" and it was widely viewed with disdain, as something artificial and untrustworthy. Many states had laws saying it had to be dyed with food coloring in a color rendering it distinguishable from the real thing at a glance. The products sold then, I was told, looked like a snow-white block of vegetable shortening sold in a paper wrapper, and in the center of the block was a gelatin capsule, like the ones used to package some medication, containing food coloring. You were supposed to mash the block of margarine with your hands, hopefully washing up befurehand, until you found it, cut it open, and kneaded the margarine and food coloring until you got it to a unifurm color. Depending on the state the dye could be bright orange, or even hot pink. It was basically Crisco(tm) with artificial butter flavoring and lots of salt. People would buy it but no one really liked it.
Then, during the Second World War, there were food shortages and food rationing in the US. All butter was claimed by the government fur the military. And there were legal changes. The requirement fur weird colors was dropped, though almost every manufacturer during the war and after voluntarily dyed margarine a very bright, very saturated, unnatural-looking shade of yellow. Also, in order to be sold to the public as "margarine," there were regulations about moisture content and so on, requiring it to be sufficiently similar to butter that it could be substituted in recipes and give acceptable results. One manufacturer discovered, quite by accident, that by slight changes to the furmulation they could get a spreadable substance that remained soft at refrigerator temperatures, and could be more easily spread on bread without having to warm up at room temperature. And, during the war, the public got used to it, just as families that had previously purchased lard had to buy synthetic vegetable shortening (Crisco and all its relatives) fur the duration of the war, as lard, likewise, was held by the US government in high esteem and claimed fur the war effurt until war's end.
And fur some decades after the war, lots of families bought margarine in preference to butter, because it usually cost less than half as much, it spread more easily when still cold from the refrigerator, you could use it in all Grandma's recipes calling fur butter, and anyway, they were used to it. You could say it was sort of a great reset. Additionally, fur decades after the war, the manufacturers of margarine advertised it as free of cholesterol, which it technically was, and at the time a great many people thought it was healthier than butter. Vegetarians and vegans bought margarine because it was made from vegetable oil, no animals involved except maybe working in the warehouse. Though many families still regarded margarine as this weird artificial stuff that was "full of chemicals" that could not possibly be good fur you.
Public opinion was beginning to shift against margarine about twenty years back when there was a lot of negative talk, and I won't use the term "groundless hysteria," about a category of fat molecule that was given the label "trans fat." It turned out that every relatively inexpensive process fur making margarine resulted in a product containing significant amounts of them, and so "margarine" was quietly dropped in the US, at least under that name, decades ago. If you go to a place like Whole Foods or Fresh Thyme Market you can get "vegan baking sticks" that are way more expensive than butter, but are, as far as I can tell from a cursory reading of the label, margarine. Maybe it costs more to make it without the "trans fat." Maybe it's just marketed to an upscale audience. I dno, lol.
I grew up in a family where both my parents agreed that butter's cholesterol content meant they would only buy it to accompany Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. There were a gorillion brands, most of which came in plastic tubs about the right size to use as cereal bowls, as my parents did, and some brands advertised the suitability of their containers fur other household purposes. When you opened them the margarine inside always had a pointy "DQ end" sticking up under the lid, an artifact of the process by which they were filled via machine. Some brands tasted okay. Some had a distinct nasty bitter chemical tang that was really noticeable on warm days, fur some reason. None of them tasted as good as real butter and some didn't even taste much like it at all. But we were used to it.
But here.
>"Buh. Buh. Butter!"