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Up until maybe five years ago, I was a butter ascetic. For reasons buried deeply in my culinary upbringing, I bought and used only unsalted butter, usually from Land O’Lakes. It was sweet, affordable, versatile: pretty good smeared on bread; pretty good for mixing with garlic, lemon zest, and herbs and stuffing under the skin of a roasting chicken; pretty good for cooking an omelette. Overall, I’d grade it a B+/A-. Maybe just a B+.

This is not to say I never ate other butters. In fact, I developed an occasional hankering for cheapo Hotel Bar¹ butter, which I always imagine in single-pat form, sandwiched between a square of plasticized cardboard and an equal square of wax paper. At a restaurant in Oaxaca, I remember eating a wonderful butter mixed with pequin chilies. And I certainly appreciated high-quality butter in France — one of my favorite meals of all time was nothing but a fresh baguette, a slab of Échiré, and a very cold bottle of Sancerre.

But those other butters — those better butters — always felt like indulgences, treats that only made sense outside of my own home. Who was I to stock my fridge with imported dairy fat, some yuppie, some aristocrat? No, I would remain frugal. Good old unsalted Land O’Lakes was enough for me, Jean, and our family.

Four or five years ago, however, we were invited to Christmas Day dinner with our neighbors Jeff, Shauna, and Bea. This is always an excellent meal: a standing rib roast, fresh fettuccine with shaved black truffles, wines you would not believe. But what I remember from that year is the butter on the table: Delitia’s buffalo-milk butter, from Parma, Italy. Creamy, tangy, at once mouth-fillingly flavorful and somehow light, it was a revelation, standing out among the dinner’s other delights not only to me but to Jean as well. We knew we were going to have to get this stuff for ourselves.

Thus began my journey into the world’s better butters.

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To my surprise, that first 250-gram slab of Delitia took a long time to get through. Months, in fact! Maybe we were not eating a lot of bread at the time? Or maybe, after our initial thrall, we tired of its tang and began to crave a more classic butterfat flavor. All I know is that as I watched the wax-paper wrapper shrink and shrink, I was looking forward to the moment when it would be small enough that I could justify buying a new butter, and continuing my explorations.

When that day came — when I could see that the next use of the Delitia would clearly leave us without good spread — I went French. The butters of Isigny Ste. Mère, a Normandy cooperative founded in 1909, have found excellent distribution in New York City: You’ll see their colorful, foil-wrapped slabs not just in Whole Foods and specialty grocers but at gentrifier bodegas like the Mr. Fruit chain. Isigny Ste. Mère has a whole range, and I’ve ping-ponged between their standard AOP variety and their churned beurre de baratte, which tends to smear more easily. The important thing (and perhaps this was what was missing from the Delitia) is to choose a salted butter, ideally embedded with sel de guérande. The gentle saline crack of those flakes² against the richness of the butter and a backdrop of good baguette or tangy sourdough is… sorry, I’m drooling too much to complete that thought.

Shifting to salted butter was a huge step for me, and not just because I’d become accustomed to unsalted. I’m an independent sort of person, and I’ve always preferred my ingredients as simple as possible. If I wanted my bread-and-butter salty, I once thought, I’d just dip into my enormous bucket of Maldon and sprinkle it on myself. Of course, I never once did this. It wasn’t until my experimental mood led me to try that top-end Isigny Ste. Mère that I realized the genius of the all-in-one butter. It’s gorgeous, and I’m a convert.

Since my Betty Botta moment, I’ve occasionally veered from French butter. Kerrygold — which is produced in Ireland, but only for export — has even better distribution than Isigny Ste. Mère, so I’ve bought it in a pinch… and been disappointed. It’s rich but flat; eating it doesn’t inspire me to imagine the meadows in which the cows have grazed. Ploughgate Creamery’s salted cultured butter, from Vermont, is wonderful, as good as anything from Normandy — but it’s hard to find and fairly expensive.

As far as I’ve come on my butter journey, the expense still nags at me. The Isigny Ste. Mère options are $6.99 at best, and often $8.99, and Delitia and Maison Bordier are typically a dollar or two more. I know in my heart that’s not a whole lot, but lately, like many people in this fine city, I’m feeling squeezed. Am I really, I ask myself as I walk the supermarket aisles, going to spend ten bucks on butter? What kind of pretentious dick am I to drop so much on such a basic element of my diet? Is this necessary?

And the thing is, my indulgences are few. I try never to spend recklessly, and my appetite for so-called luxury ingredients is limited. I’m content with pét-nats and cavas instead of Champagne, chicken-liver mousse instead of foie gras. I’d rather gobble spoonfuls of salmon roe than bumps of beluga caviar. (Tashkent Supermarket sells eight-ounce jars of salmon roe for less than $30!) I buy in bulk, cook at home, eye name brands with skepticism, make a little go a long way.

Still, I want a minimum of quality. Crap garlic from China? Styrofoam-dyed ground beef? Lettuce as flavorless as the plastic it comes wrapped in? Please. One must have standards.

The problem is that my standards are increasingly coming into conflict with my instinct for frugality. Whether it’s innate³ or a result of my years as the Frugal Traveler, I am now predisposed to hunt bargains. I believe in the depths of my soul that the pleasures of life should be affordable, and that the affordable elements of life can and should and do provide pleasure. As the Frugal Traveler, my advice was often: Sure, seek out the discounts and hacks that will lower your costs, but also learn to enjoy the experiences that are already free or inexpensive. For anyone engaged in this kind of pursuit, whether traveling or at home, there will still always be a line, a limit, where perceived joy is cancelled out by sticker shock. More and more in the last few years, I’ve been hitting that limit. Good ice cream for $10 a pint (and a 14-ounce “pint” at that)? I just cannot. I will not! Instead, I’ll subsist on suboptimal mint chocolate chip. Let’s blame inflation and tariffs, shall we, rather than my becoming a crotchety man whose economic sense is mired in the distant past? Yes, we shall.

As a corollary, this has warped my sense of what constitutes a guilty pleasure. Maybe once, a guilty pleasure meant too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat — or just too much: a half-tray of lasagne, a few extra scoops of Chubby Hubby. Not that I ever felt particularly guilty. I’ve always liked Nigella Lawson’s possibly apocryphal formulation — “if you feel guilty about pleasure⁵, you don’t deserve to have pleasure“ — and “too much” also happens to describe my approach to exercise. Now, though, the guilt is purely financial, transforming what should be hedonistic indulgence into a deeply unsexy cost-benefit analysis. Nigella would be disgusted. Forgive me, Nigella!

But as so often happens, the mental habits that have gotten me so twisted up have also helped straighten me out. About a month ago, our supply of beurre de baratte nearing depletion, I found myself again at Whole Foods, feeling the first familiar twinges of guilt. I sighed. Were the prices for Isigny Ste. Mère here any better than at, say, my butcher Paisanos? But as I stared into the butter cooler, my eye was caught but a plainer white wrapper, slightly yellow from the butter within, printed with cursive red and blue letters: Les Prés Salés, made in Belgium but with coarse sea salt from Camargue, France. The price: $4.49! Definitely worth I shot, I figured, and what a shot it was! Les Prés Salés has a lushness and an intensity I hadn’t tasted in the other butters — it is magnificent. But don’t just take my word for it: When we had friends over for Hanukkah dinner, it was out there on the table, and got easily as many enthusiastic compliments as my latkes⁶ (served with lots of Tashkent salmon roe). Soon after, I was back at Whole Foods for some regular shopping, and I checked the butter fridge, worried the low, low price might have been an error. It wasn’t. It held. And even though we still had plenty back home, I bought another slab, just because I could. It definitely felt indulgent, but so what? I can afford it — for now. 🪨🪨🪨