You love it on toast and in mashed potatoes. Maybe you’ve even enjoyed it in your coffee lately. Aside from making things more delicious, butter has quite an interesting story. In Butter: A Rich History, Elaine Khosrova explores the early beginnings, cultural importance and manufacturing evolution of the essential ingredient. The food historian and former pastry chef dedicates the second half of the book to buttery recipes, like Old-Fashioned Buttercream Frosting, Po Cha (Tibetan Butter Tea) and Hollandaise.

Did you know that baked goods get their different textures depending on how butter is combined with flour and sugar; when you cream butter and sugar to make a cake, you’re really aerating the blended ingredients, forming tiny gas bubbles in the fat. This gives cake a tender, springy texture.

Here are five more fun facts about butter from the book:

The world’s earliest butters were made from the milk of yak, sheep and goats—not cows! Camel, reindeer, mare and water buffalo also provided milk for thousands of years. Butter was involved in some Celtic pagan practices, and in Ireland, it was believed that a “witch” could use magic to steal the neighbor’s “butter luck.” People had all sorts of practices for preventing such supernatural disasters. Tibetan butter sculpture is an ancient practice where monks use butter to create intricate, colorful figures called “tormas” used in Buddhist rituals and as offerings to the deities. The French loved fancy butter—who’s surprised? In the 18th and 19th centuries, dairymaids created expensive butters and sold them in Paris for foodies from Europe and North America. One hot commodity was perfumed butter, made by layering unsalted butter with flowers. Grassland Dairy in Greenwood, Wisconsin, produces 42,000 pounds of butter per hour using three continuous churns.

Adapted from Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova. © 2016 by Elaine Khosrova. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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