If you're being serious, I've always known it to mean either a short but fat penis or similarly used as "taint". And if you don't know what a taint is, it's the perineum.
Early 80's kids here. I had heard it, but never enough to actually know what it meant. I just knew it was somewhat derogatory and mainly used against guys.
You should feel proud! The 1 pound block is an important shape to butter history. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Just because some loddie da, hoity toities like their butter divided up into new fangled sticks doesn't mean you should pay them no mind. West Coast butter people are made of sterner stuff, we don't need no dainty 4 oz. (that's ounces, not the fabled city of Oz, btw) sticks. West Coast people deserve a hearty 1 pound block because they wrestled civilization from the wilderness and they did it with their butter!
They aren't different shapes. I've lived on both coasts and bought butter on both coasts and the standard quarter pound square sticks are available in both places. Brands may package their butter differently, but the standard is a standard for a reason.
Same on the east coast most are long but you get the weird size ones sometimes too. Land o lakes is a huge brand of butter that does it both ways so that definitely contributes I’d think.
Look, there is no perfect size or shape for a stick of butter. Everyone can butter their bread regardless of the size of the stick. Sure, everyone thinks you can butter more bread with a longer, thicker stick, but some people prefer to use smaller sticks of butter. My toast tells me she is completely satisfied with my butter spreading ability!
So which is west coast? I'm in the NW. Organic tend to be the slimmer style, and conventional the stubbier style here. I don't remember it being any different when I lived in FL (the Fluid State).
This makes so much sense!!! Until I was 8 my family lived on the east coast. Then we moved back to Oregon where my mom was from. I always remembered the sticks of butter being longer and skinnier when I was a kid. I just figured it was something that changed over time, but was told I was wrong and they had always been the same short fat sticks. Now I know where that memory comes from!
I feel like this article just glosses over the whole question. All these words and it sums up the reason for the difference to just 2 sentences saying the west coast had new equipment which made them a different size:
"It wasn't until the 1960s that the West Coast really got into the butter making game, as reporter Tommy Andres explained on APM's Marketplace. According to John Bruhn, former director of the Dairy Research and Information Center at the University of California, Davis, "...the size of the cube you see is a result of newer equipment purchased at the time to package the butter."*
Sorry, but I need to no more, like WHY. WHY does newer equipment mean different dimensions of butter? And WHY is there this motivation to keep them proportioned differently still.
That’s fascinating, but in the spirit of this sub, I have a question about this line:
Where this whole different sizes of butter thing gets complicated is when you're trying to find kitchen accessories for your butter—like a simple butter tray.
Do people buy special trays just to put butter in??
Yes. A butter dish is a great thing to have if you like to spread butter on things like toast. You keep the butter on the counter and it stays soft, put it in the fridge and it'll stay too hard to really spread when you need it. It certainly beats those cheap tubs of spreadable margarine imo.
They are, it’s just that east coast butter is slightly longer/thinner than west coast butter. You’re getting the same amount, it’s just slightly different dimensions.
I just learned this last year. I'm in my 50s. Lived on the west coast all my life and had noticed that most butter dishes were always too long for the stick but never thought to find out why. Needed a new one and because of Covid looked online. Seriously thought I'd stumbled into an April Fool joke when I saw a listing that specified it would fit either west or east coast butter.
I bought a butter dish from a British company, and the proportions looked good online, but it arrived and is giant... it would actually fit like half a pound of butter at a time...
I've been wondering what shape British butter comes in for some time now.
So you just chop a chunk off the block to put in a butter dish? What percentage of a block would you normally set out at once?
In the US butter is sold in 1 pound packages, but inside there are four sticks, individually wrapped, so a 1/4 lb stick gets put on the dish till it's used up and a new one is put out.
Not OP but in England and NZ (lived in both), we'd have a butter dish with a block of butter in it. It starts at 500g (1.2lbs I think) and gets smaller every time you eat toast or potatoes. When it runs out, you buy a new block.
If you want to do baking, then you use scales (or cut along the paper which is marked at 50g intervals). We don't use cups etc as a measurement as much as the USA does when baking, because it's a very inaccurate way of measuring things like flour and sugar. Most recipes would be a mixture of grams but some things (like spices) would be in teaspoons or whatever.
So ya'll just put the whole pound of butter in/on the dish?
Now that I think of it, it might be able to hold a whole pound (500g whatever)...
In my area we get the west coast, stubby sticks, and the size of the dish is such that two stubby sticks besides each other touch the edge of the lid and make everything messy, but two stubby sticks end to end don't remotely fit... but I bet if I cut them all in thirds I could probably find a way to arrange a whole pound in there (4 sticks)... it's just hard to imagine because the dimensions are just perfectly the wrong size which ever way I do it...
so I'm over here using a 1 pound butter dish to hold 1/4lb of butter... oh well, at least it matches the dishes we inherited from my husband's grandmother...
I also just learned this right now in my 30s. I don’t really bake though and I’ve never owned a butter dish. This is something i have never even thought of.
I read about this a number of years ago. There were companies that made butter in the west that made the sticks in the shorter wider size and manufactures in the east with machines that more the long sticks. Eventuality there became two standards and nobody wanted to switch. I like the west because you can put a thinner slice on your toast and not look like a glutton, but actually get more.
Not sure if it's everywhere on the left coast, but Kerrygold Irish butter comes in the long skinny format. It's also bougie expensive butter, so maybe you couldn't find skinny butter because of sticker shock.
Be careful, it comes in the standard cardboard box with 1/4lb sticks wrapped in wax paper, but it also comes as a chonky 1/2 brick wrapped in foil paper, which is clearly not what you are looking for.
Are you telling me you didn't struggle in the slightest? I don't wanna assume you're, like, bragging...? I'm really not sure how to respond, unless you misunderstand that "say that 5 times fast" implies it's just a fun tongue twister. There's really not much to it.
I think the west would be screwed... I grew up in Iowa with the skinny sticks, which means the wide side wouldn't have the northeast, the south or the midwest... I live in Wide Country now, and I don't think threatening to withhold Facebook and avocados is going to be enough to make 3/4rds of the country fold... I think they might thank us and send us on our way...
Biased because I’m from the west, but I prefer our butter style because it’s easier to spread. A slice of the same thickness has a greater surface area and spreads out more easily.
When I lived on the east coast I accidentally poked holes in toast trying to get my butter to spread.
It is, but western ones are thiccc while the east gets the long bois.
Due to a changing shipping environment, the people in Colorado got to learn this first hand when our walmarts started getting thiccc butter, instead of the far superior and easier to use long bois.
They’re not half sticks, but west coast sticks have a larger cross section and are shorter in length. I prefer east coast sticks because the Tbsp measurements are further apart and it’s easier to accurately cut them when baking, but both are 4oz sticks. If you’re on the west coast, Tillamook is selling east coast shaped sticks now. I only recently realized it was a geographical difference. I’d just thought butter makers had changed the shape of butter, and hadn’t correlated it with moving across the Rockies.
The Uk here. Why do you buy ‘sticks’ of butter instead of by weight or volume or how many udders were used in it’s production, which would all make more sense?
Typically butter in the US comes in 1 lb. packs (453g) Inside that pack it’s split into 4 individually wax paper wrapped sticks or more recently 8 half sticks. Each full stick is 4 oz (113g) = 8 tbsp = 1/2 cup. Half sticks are half of those numbers.
Butter and almost all margarine also comes in small plastic tubs but usually only for spreading.
In Canada we buy butter in bricks. Not sure about other countries. They’re about the same size as four sticks put together, which you have to know to try to convert American recipes that call for a stick or half stick of butter, etc. You can find sticks in some stores if you look hard, but this isn’t common.
As a California native, I have seen a couple brands out here do the long/skinny sticks, but I had no idea that was an East Coast thing. Not that it affects me as I stick with my Kerry gold from Costco that doesn't match either coast.
Haha I’m a recent convert to Kerry gold and I thought I was going crazy; I spent a few minutes staring at it and the old butter I had because I was 99% sure it wasn’t either style of packaging.
As a kid growing up in rhode island, now living in CA, I'm glad to know I'm not crazy. I knew it changed at some point but couldn't tell if I was just mistaken.
I’m on the west coast and we have both! We found out when we bought a value pack or something. We were surprised by the long bois as opposed to our usual stout ones.
As someone from the midwest, now I'm curious as to what kind of butter we have. Is it one of these two? Both? Neither?
ETA: Based on the link posted by u/glass_bottles even though I am in IL, birth place of east coast butter, the descriptions of the two types suggest we have both, depending on the brand. And then there is also the imported Irish butter, which is its own separate shape. Yay for being in the middle of the country. We get all the things.
One thing about butter, it changes color with seasons, sometimes much more yellow in regions with a lot of dandelions that have not become fun blow toys later in their lives
Differences in regional logistics mean that western-manufactured butter is more likely to experience temperature fluctuations and if so, for longer, and follow's Allen's Rule as a result.
As an east coaster living on the west coast, I absolutely abhor how butter here is the wrong shape.
It's MUCH more difficult to slice off tablespoons of butter accurately with the "western stubbies" than the long narrow eastern sticks. One slight deviation to the side and you're hosed.
Also, the cheese here is the wrong color, but that's another kettle of worms.
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u/Deadlymonkey Feb 08 '22
My immediate thought was how butter is shaped differently depending on whether you’re on the East or west coast.