A Butter Dish Is the Only Hyper-Specific Kitchen Item Worth Buying

January 03, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Live a happier life with room temperature butter

In the age of “streamlining” and a cultural crusade to eliminate clutter, conventional wisdom cautions (or scorns) us against letting single-purpose gadgets pile up in drawers and cabinets. I, for one, feel a deep-seated (albeit probably unjustified) moral opposition to things like garlic presses and melon ballers. But one highly specific impulse-purchased kitchen item has brought untold amounts of joy to my day-to-day life. That item, friends, is a butter dish.

My butter dish doesn’t save me time, or save me money, or promise a gourmet weeknight meal in 20 minutes or less. It doesn’t actually do anything, being just a butter-shaped plate with a lid. The butter dish serves only one purpose, and that purpose is to enable me to leave a stick of butter on my kitchen counter all the time — and to never again settle for a rock-hard, bread-mauling slab of butter-colored granite.

Inside its cozy ceramic crock, the butter not only remains at room temperature; it also stays safely tucked away from the light, air, and bacteria that might otherwise degrade it outside the fridge. (Yes, when armed with a butter dish, it’s perfectly safe to leave your butter out. You wouldn’t want to leave it sitting on the counter for months on end — but I mean, we’re talking about delicious, creamy, soft, spreadable butter. How on earth could you?)

After so many soft slices of bread utterly torn asunder by a forceful knife-drag of cold butter, it feels a little transformative to simply have soft, supple, bread-friendly butter right there on my counter, within reach, ready and waiting. Buttered toast with fried eggs, buttered bread with hot soup, buttered toast as a mid-morning snack — it’s a revelation. And on a personal level, after years of convincing myself that low-fat cooking spray and zucchini “noodles” were just as good as the real thing (“even better, honestly!!!”), reaching for my butter dish and gliding a dull knife through a velvet-soft pat of Kerrygold feels like nothing short of a triumph.

On a less philosophical level: a butter dish simply looks nice on your countertop. The particular butter dish I chose is aesthetically unremarkable — mine is a plain white, ceramic butter dish picked up at the T.J. Maxx checkout line for $3 — but I’m dizzied by the options out there: there’s classic, sturdy Le Creuset; smooth, minimalist ceramic; and kitschy vintage jadeite. Put your butter in a swan, a bell jar, a fake stick of butter. Just put your butter somewhere, so that you, like me, can butter your bread properly — and in doing so, steal a tiny bit of pedestrian pleasure out of each day. I promise you’ll never go back.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.