Butter Pats

Yesterday I mentioned the antique wooden butter pats that were passed down to me from my Scottish grandmother. In case you’ve never heard of butter pats, they were used to mold butter into textured shapes to serve with bread. When we had special dinner guests, my mom would use her slightly more modern pair to make fancy pats of butter to place on the table, and in time I too learned how to do it. The trick is getting the butter the right consistency. Not too hard, not too soft. You roll a cube of butter between the paddles, back and forth, around and around, until the cube is transformed into either a ball or an oval. It takes some time and can be more than a little fiddly. Hand-shaped pats of butter are just one more of those things that seem to have fallen by the wayside.