As a baker I took it on faith for years that unsalted butter was best. We are told that unsalted allows you to salt your dish more precisely — which, when making pastry, is rather important: too little salt is a disaster, but then again, so is too much. We are also assured that salt, acting as a preservative, may make the butter keep longer but does not mean that what you’ve bought is fresh. Yet lately, I’ve had reason to doubt the Salted/Unsalted Butter Divide. For one thing, I think butter flies off most supermarket refrigerated shelves pretty frequently: I’m not concerned about freshness when I buy. For another, I tried Président’s salted version (it’s my go-to butter when at home, and is French, as the name suggests), just to see what I might be missing, and the truth is that when it was spread on my homemade bread, the salt was undetectable. It might just as well have been unsalted. And according to Olivia Potts — whose delightful and generously wide-ranging book I have just bought and can highly recommend — salted will do just fine, even for baking. She’s no stickler for one or the other when there really is no need to be.

Butter has become important to me in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined even a handful of years ago. When I was young, I always chose butter over manufactured spreads: I knew instinctively that anything that is only a few steps away from the cow it came from must be better for you than the goop we were told was better for us (it wasn’t). But perhaps because of the era I grew up in, where fats were highly suspect and public messaging warned us off them, I never really thought of oils such as butter as food. It’s as if I saw it (without much thought) as a kind of edible non-food, or a food by-product. Only in the past few years of baking, and of learning a lot more about nutrition, have I come to really appreciate and enjoy it. Now I want to taste the butter by itself: when you are restricting calories, an excellent toasted bread with plain butter on it is almost as delicious as a slice of cake. I had long since made up my mind that butter wasn’t bad, but now I’ve decided that it’s positively good. Good on the tongue, and good in the bod: Butter is a great source of vitamins A, D, E, B12, and K, as well as calcium. It helps to prevent diabetes, support thyroid functioning, and promote good vision throughout life. And if you’re pregnant, it helps your growing baby. So, my verdict is in: Butter is not just a food, it’s a power food!