Butter makes everything better, including these recipes

In your mind’s eye, lay out a map of Europe, all the way from the British Isles east into the Black Sea, then north of Scandinavia, south to Africa.

Now let’s draw a long line: starting along the northern coast of Spain, entering east into France around the city of Bordeaux, skirting the southern edge of Switzerland, along the Alps and into eastern Europe, dipping a bit as we glide along the northern limit of Greece and enter the Black Sea at Istanbul.

North of this line — taking in all of the United Kingdom, the northern two-thirds of France, all of Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Eastern Europe as a whole — the cooking fat is butter. South of it — the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece — the cooking fat, by and large, is olive oil.

Also of note: on the whole, south-of-the-line languages are rooted in Latin and a bit of Greek; north of it, in a polyglot of Indo-European, Saxon, Norse and anything but Latin. North of the line but just east to the Alps’ end, the principal post-medieval religions are Protestant; south and into Eastern Europe, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian. North of the line, alcoholic beverages made of grains; south of it, of grapes.

But it is the separation of butter and olive oil that interests cooks. See how English-speaking countries took their pantries’ butter with them when their populations — Irish, say, or English or Scots — emigrated to or colonized new lands. How Germans and Dutch did the same. Or the way Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards poured olive oil into their own colonies and conquests.

About butter, especially today, some thoughts — not the least to rescue at least the idea of it from what appear to be impending shortages of it in our own country and at a challenging time of year for such a deficiency.

What a wonder of a fat butter is! Incomparable in taste and texture, in any kitchen it anoints whatever it is spread upon, melted into or coats. (Indeed, the ancient Greeks prized it as an ointment, not a cooking fat.)

Butter is a churning of the cream of milk (primarily of the beef cow, but also of the goat, sheep and other female mammals) which cream is around 40 percent fat. Cream is an oil-in-water emulsion at the ratio of 0.7:1, fat-to-water. Churned cream — butter — rearranges the fat into a water-in-fat emulsion with a fat-to-water ratio of 5.7:1. A very arithmetic, even sterile, way to explain its luxuriousness, its final approximation of 80 percent fat.

This new ratio of fat to water makes butter, in the words of the food scientist Harold McGee, “a sauce waiting to be made.” A cook is able to take as little as 1 tablespoon of liquid (wine, vinegar, jus, juice, even plain water) and incorporate into it a nearly unlimited amount of butter — but let’s say a full stick (or 8 tablespoons) will do for close to maximum pleasure — and “monter,” as French cooks have it, the juices of a sauté pan into another order of deliciousness. Or make a beurre blanc to dress any sort of vegetable or fish.

Even overcooked into a “beurre noisette” (“nutty butter”), wherein butter’s milk solids and proteins are slightly scorched, such “brown butter,” as we call it, is a fine dressing for foods such as pasta or rice.