Ireland is famous around the world for its dairy products.

Butter, milk and cream are really delicious. Why are they so good?

People say the rolling green hills and the grass that cows feed on are the reason.

The butter is rich, creamy and yellow. It is tasty and salty.

In early Medieval Ireland, butter was a luxury food; it also was used as payment of taxes and rent along with cows, pigs, bacon and honey, according to the ancient Brehon Laws. So precious that people bury it!

Have you ever heard about bog butter? Bog butter is a proper butter made of cow’s milk, nothing special so far; its age is special. This butter was buried thousands of years ago in bogs.

Imagine how shocked people were to find butter while digging up their turf!

Chunks of butter stored in pots, wooden containers, animal skins or even wrapped in barks were unearthed in Kildare and Meath.

Well, it turned out that bogs were the right place to bury it because the bog’s cool, low-oxygen, high-acid environment preserved the perishable butter from deterioration.

Bogs acted as a perfect natural refrigerator to protect butter from drought, famine and war.

There are other theories about bog butter as well. It could also have been buried in the bog as an offering to the gods or spirits.

Brave researchers tasted it, the taste got curious adjectives such as ‘animal’ or ‘gamy’, ‘moss’, ‘funky’, ‘pungent’, and ‘salami’, but, apparently, it smelled like fresh butter.

Then salt came.

In medieval Ireland, a number of monasteries engaged in salt production.

Later, Ireland imported salt from France and Portugal in the early seventeenth century.

Salting became the primary technology used to preserve meat, fish, and butter and promoted the development of trade. From the mid-1700s, salt butter was one of Ireland’s great export stables.

Fine-grained salt was used to cure the butter and, in some circumstances, in conjunction with saltpetre and sugar.

Probably the butter was heavily salted, and the taste was too salty, but, I think, it led to the nowadays delicious Irish butter.

So, when you are at the supermarket grabbing your butter (possibly Kerrygold, so internationally known even in the US), think about its incredible history!