Butter

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1996

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Themes

What We Ate: Exploring Identity Through Childhood Memories of Food

You are what you eat, goes the adage. In the case of Alexander’s “Butter,” the speaker is, among other qualities, a culinary citizen of the world, as well as an American. Turkey is a bird native to the Americas; sauteed, it is cooked in the French style. Pasta—the speaker’s “green noodles” (Line 6)—comes from Asia by way of Italy. The puffy dough known as “Yorkshire puddings” (Line 8) is a traditional side dish to the Sunday roast in Great Britain.

An exhaustive treatment of the food ethnology of “Butter” would be lengthy indeed. The fat itself has its origins in Africa. Ghee, the butter of Helen Bannerman’s children’s book, is clarified butter, widely used in Indian cuisine. Corn is everywhere in “Butter,” from glazed ears to grits. Its origins, as the turkey, are in the Americas. Corn products such as corn syrup—a primary ingredient in “Alaga syrup” (Line 18)—have worked their way into thousands of everyday foods and household products, including fuel.

There is something Walt Whitman-like in the childhood menu: It contains multitudes, and those multitudes share complex histories. The speaker’s memories offer a panorama of not only influence, but of attitude, as well. The speaker’s mother chomps butter right off the stick. Children lick their plates. However, it is not likely that anyone ate those turkey cutlets with their fingers. Gravy, as opposed to sauce, is a down-home effort created from pan drippings; it is eschewed for the rice, which is flavored, instead, with rich and costly butter.

The reader cannot know from the poem alone that The Story of Little Black Sambo involves the child eating almost 200 pancakes, made with the butter from his would-be assassins, the tigers. The children in “Butter” are sated, as well, by their breakfast and “glowing from the inside” (Line 24). Whatever else they are, they are richly fed.

The Southern-Influenced Table

The influence of southern cuisine runs deep in “Butter.” The name “Alaga” of the poem’s “Alaga syrup” (Line 18) is a moniker for the Alabama- Georgia Syrup Company, established in 1906. According to their website, famous spokespeople for Alaga Syrup included baseball legend Hank Aaron and the singer Nat King Cole. Raw cane juice was a primary ingredient. While Alaga syrup enjoys a long history of popularity in the South, sugar itself represents a history of oppression and colonial violence. In many ways, the pleasures of the South cannot be unwound from American atrocities perpetuated in the South.

Sugar appears again as the “white” (Line 13) ingredient to be “creamed” (Line 13) in the “white bowl” (Line 13). This might be the beginning of a layer cake, sometimes referred to in the South as a church cake. Here, the whiteness inherent in the sweetness stands out. Elsewhere in the poem, sweetness is served up in color, as in the “whipped sweet potatoes” (Line 15) and the “warm Alaga syrup” (Line 18).

Corn is another complicated staple in Southern cooking. Originating in Mexico, corn (or maize) is the core ingredient in hominy grits, a ubiquitous food on Southern tables. Here, the grits form “white volcanoes” (Line 11). Playfully, the image calls up memories of playing with one’s food at the table, as well as elementary school science fair experiments. In other ways, the combination of hot fat and a mountain of starch poses a kind of danger. In “Butter,” Alexander uses both ears of corn and corn grits to run a thread that connects the South to indigenous histories as well as histories of slavery.

The Politics of Food

Even a cursory dive into the history of the Spice Routes—also known as the Silk Road—reveals a basic premise: International relations and politics gain momentum when someone has something somebody else would like to have, too. Butter, while somewhat costly to produce, is common to many cultures. Other products, however, must be procured. Sometimes procurement is a matter of simple logistics—moving something from here to there, or there to here. Other times, however, procurement requires diplomacy, or invasion. In the case of crops such as sugar, once the crop was introduced to a distant but favorable climate, it became a mega-industry that supported the slave trade, an import that irrevocably changed the cultural and political landscape of the Americas and every other affected geography.

When people think of comfort food, they do not usually associate that which gives them comfort as politically charged. In her poem, Alexander manages to weave historical clues into the recipes. In “butter glazing corn in slipping squares” (Line 10), one can imagine squares of land slipping away from the Native Americans who introduced corn to European settlers. In a similar interpretation, “butter disappearing into / whipped sweet potatoes” (Lines 14-15) gives the impression that violence absorbs whatever sweetness is introduced to it.

While “historical revision” (Line 23) and a “parent’s efforts” (Line 24) might work to erase the traumas of past political events, children carry those histories and live with their ongoing consequences. This doesn’t mean, however, that these children are in any way dulled. On the contrary, they are lit from “the inside / out” (Lines 24-25).