To Protect Your Butter from Magic, First Do Some Magic

Apparently, witches could steal or curse your butter. This must have been particularly irritating after you’d gone to all the trouble of churning it.

I photographed these wooden butter prints at the Museum of Magic in Edinburgh. Their carved flower patterns caught my eye, but the little card beside them supplied the best part: the design, described as a Daisy Witch Mark, was pressed into butter to protect it from bewitchment.

Which is where I start to smile. If you put a symbol on your butter because you believe that symbol has the power to protect it against magic… aren’t you doing magic?

Of course, yours is sensible, respectable, butter-protecting magic. Entirely different from whatever that suspicious woman down the road is doing.

What has the witch done to your butter?

Sometimes, the trouble began before you even had any butter to protect.

In dairy folklore, a witch could supposedly stop butter from forming. You could churn and churn, putting in all that effort, and still have nothing to spread on your bread. One recorded story blames a visitor’s evil eye: someone looked at the churn, and the butter simply refused to come. National Folklore Collection

Other stories suggest that your missing butter hadn’t disappeared so much as changed households.

Witches were said to walk through grazing fields on May morning carrying a hank of yarn and saying:

Gather far, gather near, gather all the milk and butter here.

Think of it as a supernatural dairy delivery service, with your cows supplying someone else’s kitchen. The same account describes witches turning into hares to steal milk—an impressive amount of effort to avoid buying their own. “Taking Butter off Churns,” National Folklore Collection

Then there’s the story of a supposed witch who milked briars, magically drawing milk from her neighbours’ cows. Their cows went dry while she continued taking great baskets of butter to market. You can imagine how well that went down locally. National Folklore Collection

So how did you protect your dairy supply? With blessings, charms, and a few supernatural precautions of your own. People tied red flannel to cows’ tails or put a silver coin in the milk pail to prevent witchcraft. National Folklore Collection

And, according to the label beside these butter prints, you could put a protective flower on your butter.

The logic is delightful: to protect your butter from magic, first do some magic.

A little protection for your own butter

You don’t need to carve a wooden stamp to give your butter a pretty flower. A teaspoon and a small bowl will do.

Choose a pretty little bowl or ramekin that you’d enjoy putting on the breakfast table. Let your butter soften until you can press it into the bowl easily, but it still holds its shape. No melting required.

Press the butter into the bowl and smooth the top with a butter knife. Now comes the magical part—or the decorating part, depending on how you prefer to explain yourself.

Dip the tip of a clean teaspoon in cold water and shake off the excess. Press it lightly into the butter to make a shallow petal, with the narrow end pointing toward the center of your flower. Lift the spoon and repeat around that center until you have a little ring of petals. Six would be lovely, but this is breakfast, so perfection is optional.

If the butter sticks to the spoon, dip it in cold water again. If it becomes too soft, give it a brief spell in the refrigerator before continuing.

Your teaspoon flower will be your own interpretation of the idea. There’s no need to reproduce the museum’s carving exactly.

Cover the bowl and refrigerate it until you’re ready to serve. Then bring it straight to the table, flower and all.

Whether it wards off witchcraft remains to be seen, but it will look very fetching beside a warm slice of bread.

Practical magic, served with toast.

Beautifying my butter,

laura