The Sticks of Butter

the mid-month post

First, a question: Did you know that butter on the West Coast is traditionally shaped differently than butter on the East Coast?

Myself, I did not know this until well into adulthood. Nowadays you can get both shapes in both locations as national companies like Land O Lakes make both options available everywhere to please folks from both regions regardless of where they live. Indeed, that’s how I first found out about the East Coast style ones. I started seeing them in my local grocery store. But it was a long time before I realized what I was seeing. I just thought that there was normal butter, and weird new long skinny sticks of butter. I didn’t know there was anything regionally specific about it.

But it turns out that the butter I thought of as the weird butter was the butter that folks on the East Coast grew up thinking was normal. Better yet, both styles of sticks of butter, have names. The long, skinny East Coast stick of butter is called the Elgin Stick. Our shorter, fatter West Coast stick of butter is called the Western Stubby. The Western Stubby! You can’t make this stuff up.

A bit of research reveals why this is the case. In 1907 Elgin, Illinois was apparently the “Butter Capitol of the World” and the West Coast did not yet have its own major dairy industry. The Elgin Butter Company developed machinery to start producing butter in quarter pound sticks in addition to the one-pound blocks that butter had previously been sold in. There’s a story that this change came at the request of a New Orleans chef who wanted to put butter dishes on the tables at his restaurant, but the company also liked that it could sell the new sticks individually for ten cents to folks who couldn’t afford the larger bricks. The Elgin machines produced sticks that were 4.8 inches long and 1.3 inches wide. Nowadays these are stacked two-by-two to make a four-pack box that’s square on the ends.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the California dairy industry really got going and began producing butter in a major way. By that time technology had moved on and California companies invested in brand-new machines to process their butter into sticks. The result of these new machines was the shorter, wider stick—3.1 inches long and 1.5 inches wide—that became known as the Western Stubby. They’re packed in a single two-by-two layer that makes for a flatter rectangular four-pack box.

That was the box I grew up throwing in the grocery cart for my mom when she’d send me to go grab the butter while doing the shopping. Looking into this butter backstory has made me realize how deep and visceral my own memories of these shapes—of both the quarter-pound stick and the one-pound box—really are. Even just looking at a picture of the Western Stubby evokes childhood to me. Nostalgia, youth, the Twentieth Century, my mother, and, on some level deep below thought, the rightness of all things. Conversely, my brain doesn’t tell me there’s anything wrong with the Elgin Stick. My mind computes and accepts it as butter just fine. Rather, I simply have no associations, positive or negative, with it whatsoever. It is simply one object in a world of many objects. Neutral, null, neuter. I look at it and I’m feeling nothing. Which, in itself, makes me somehow kind of sad. Butter deserves better.