The Easter bunny is waiting in the wings and the hot cross buns are ready to be toasted. But have you moulded your butter into the shape of a Doric or Ionic pillar yet? Thankfully, there is still time.
Butter moulds and sculptures are enjoying a moment – the sky’s the limit and butter maestros have shared pictures of butter in the shape of cowboy boots, chateaus and Le Corbusier armchairs on social media. Late last year, influencer and consummate host Laura Jackson called it “the trend of the moment” – but with the butter mould showing no signs of melting from the ether, it feels a fitting time to find out what’s going on in the dairy aisle, and beyond.
First to its most timely iteration: the butter lamb, or baranek wielkanocny in Polish. A traditional butter sculpture it graces the table at Easter lunch for many Polish, Russian and Slovenian Catholic families. It was reportedly brought to the US by the Polish people who settled there in the late 1800s, and is now big in Buffalo, New York and the midwest.
But while lambs might be particularly apt for this time of year, the internet is full of stylish moulds, from vintage wooden shapes with scalloped edges and edelweiss or on-the-nose cow motifs to silicon iterations that will help you craft cherubs or seashells. A spectacle, without being spectacularly expensive.
It should almost go without saying that social media is baked in. Naturally, pictures of tablescaped dinner parties complete with moulded butter are catnip on Instagram. Plus, part of the popularity can be traced to the moment we are seeing for all things “coquette”, the embrace of things squarely “girly”, from bows to ballet flats.
Butter moulding is not new. In 2018, Laila Gohar, whose food artistry is hard to fully capture in words, made a sculpture of a reaching hand in butter. Other designs have included segments of faces with piercing, if creamy eyes. “The first butter sculpture I made was in 2018,” Gohar told Vogue in January. “At the time I hadn’t seen contemporary butter sculptures around. I was doing research and reading about the first butter sculptures that were made of yak butter in ancient China. The idea started from there.” Now no fashionable table, crafted with social media front of mind, will be properly laid without one this Easter weekend.
But for all the cutesy hearts and farmyard animals made of butter, food as art has a pleasingly nihilistic, Ozymandias quality to it – “nothing beside remains” as butter melts into warm bread. “Made to be destroyed,” Gohar captioned a video of a small-scale sculpture of the Venus de Milo, made of churned cream rather than marble, being spread on to a crusty wedge of baguette. Watch it here (the final slide) and tell me it’s not satisfying to behold.
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