Over a year ago, I started leaving my butter out on the counter in my kitchen instead of putting it in the refrigerator. So far, so good. I have never had any go rancid, and I just love that I always have spreadable butter for my toast. At the same time, I switched from cheap supermarket butter to Kerrygold Irish Butter. It costs more, but I will never go back to regular butter. Here’s what Sama Hoole says about your butter.

Butter did not live in the fridge in this country until the mid eighties.

It lived on the table. Under a little lid, or a bell of frosted glass, and it stayed put from breakfast to supper. It got a top-up, never a wash and a fresh pack. When it ran low, more went in. It was there the way the salt was there and the teapot was there, and nobody in that house gave it a second thought.

And it was soft. You pulled it straight across warm toast without tearing a hole in the middle, without the wait, without the cold shrapnel that comes off a fridge-hard block.

It sat out through a July afternoon and nothing happened. It sat out through Christmas week beside the cake and nothing happened. Your grandmother kept butter on the side for fifty years and buried nobody.

Butter is around eighty per cent fat, and the water in it is locked in droplets inside that fat with the salt dissolved in them. Bacteria need free water and there is almost none to be had. The fat is the thing keeping it safe.

The fat. The exact property they spent forty years telling your mother would kill her is the property that lets butter sit on a table all summer and behave itself.

She knew none of that and she was right anyway.

Then the government’s committee on nutrition reported in 1984, the country was told to cut the fat out, and inside about three years the dish was in a cupboard and there was a tub in the fridge door with a sunflower on the lid.

Butter out of a fridge cannot be spread. It tears the bread and sits on the knife in a lump. The tub beat butter on exactly one thing, which was that it came out already soft, and it only had that advantage because the competition had just been sent somewhere cold on doctor’s orders.

Clover launched in September 1983, made by Dairy Crest, which was the processing arm of the Milk Marketing Board. The dairy industry’s own company sold Britain the tub.

Then it sold the fix. Spreadable butter is butter with rapeseed oil blended through it so it comes out of the fridge soft, and the market leader runs at sixty four per cent butter to twenty three per cent oil. It costs more than the block it is diluting.

There is a generation now that flinches at a fat left out at room temperature, and the same people will eat mayonnaise out of a jar that has been sat on a warehouse shelf since March.

Leave a dish of it out tomorrow. Watch it sit there all day doing absolutely nothing, then spread it without a fight.

Your fridge is full of things that would have you on the floor by Thursday. The butter was never one of them.

Please do note that when he says “this country” he is referring to England, where he lives.

Enjoy that nice, soft butter!