Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Family, football and, most importantly, food. While some may be getting into political arguments around the dinner table, it just seems immature and unneeded when compared to the real topic that should be debated: Should bread rolls be buttered? Put down your forks and knives and pick up a turkey leg, because it’s time for the Thanksgiving food fight you’ve all been waiting for.
Thaddeus Sawyer, Staff Writer, he/him, thaddeus.sawyer@uconn.edu
Allow me to begin my explanation with an analogy. Say you go to Five Guys and order some fries. Knowing Five Guys, there’s a decent chance you had to take out a second mortgage on your house or sell an internal organ on the black market to afford them. There’s a good reason for the comparatively exorbitant price marks: the fries are good. In fact, they’re really good. So good that it begs the question of why someone would want to cover the flavor with a condiment.
You pay a premium for high quality ingredients and resulting flavor. No knock on McDonald’s fries, but the spuds at Five Guys are a cut above the rest. Maybe McDonald’s fries need a little extra help from ketchup. The fries at Five Guys, however, hold up just fine on their own without being dipped in vinegar or drenched in tomato.
That long-winded analysis is to say that something that is already perfect doesn’t need anything else to try and make it better. In fact, I would call it subtraction by addition.
With butter, the bread roll becomes less special. There’s something magical about a little ball made up of processed ingredients coming out of a plastic bag. You put a few on a pan and bake until golden brown, leaving a crunchy exterior that gives way to soft and warm layers inside. It’s meant to be savored and enjoyed for each individual experience, not manhandled and ripped in half so that you can cool it down with butter that you probably forgot to take out of the fridge until two minutes before.
There’s a reason that a bread roll holds up on its own. Its simplicity is its strength. It’s not meant to be something it isn’t. The reason it stands on its own is because it’s different than anything else on the Thanksgiving table. Adding butter turns it into a generic experience that just blends in with the rest of dinner. If you’re going to put ketchup on steak, go get a hamburger. If you’re going to put butter on a roll, go make some toast.
Can you add butter to a roll? Sure. But what next? Jam? Peanut butter and jelly? A full turkey sandwich with extra mayo? Stop the madness!
Zayda Shevlin, Contributor, She/Her, fhy24005@uconn.edu
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night coughing up a lung. Dry throat, dry mouth, reaching over to your desk feeling around in the dark hoping that you happened to leave a cup of water there the night before. You stretch your tired arm and reach for a cup of water that’s been there who knows how long. As the water meets your mouth, you’re finally left with a sense of relief that you won’t have to experience that fatal feeling of trying to gasp for breath as your mouth is drying up frustratingly, drop by drop.
This feeling I have described is what it’s like to eat a roll without butter. Nobody likes the feeling of having to down an entire drink while your mouth is glued shut by a firm, dry roll.
Thanksgiving dinner is already stressful enough for most. Maybe you’re dealing with annoying or hostile family members or trying to look your best. Then comes the food politics and polite manners. Everything is a performance, and you just want to finally get to the part where you can forget about the show and enjoy your meal, without the judgement of others.
That all goes to fail though, when it’s time to settle down at the table and dig into an appetizer while everyone’s still lightly chatting. Trying not to make yourself noticed, you pass on asking someone to hand over the butter from the other side of the table, so you settle with an unflavored, unbuttered, dry roll. That’s until your mouth gets too full of the chalkiness you just consumed, and you end up projectile coughing out breadcrumbs all over the table. So much for going unnoticed.
This scene is one to remember and will be talked about on foregoing Thanksgivings for years on. “Hey, remember that time you didn’t want to butter your roll?”
Butter is a delicacy that dates back to about 10,000 years ago. So, for 10,000 years, butter and bread have been a classic duo. Rolls are meant to be eaten with butter. The saying is “we’re like bread and butter,” not “we’re like dry bread with no butter.”
The saltiness and warmth of the butter mixes perfectly with the crunchiness of the roll, creating a perfect mix of a moist interior and a crispy exterior. Eating a perfectly buttered roll feels like Remy eating a strawberry with cheese. Your mind fills with color and satisfaction, especially since you didn’t just have to cough up crumbs in front of your entire ancestral line.
I’m not a food critic, but I think I eat enough to think like one, and I can’t think of a restaurant I’ve been to where they didn’t accompany rolls with butter. It’s like chips without salsa or macaroni without cheese.
I would argue that rolls with butter might be one of the most classic food combinations of all time, and you can’t have one without the other. Rolls are meant to be eaten with butter, and they heighten the consumer’s experience, kick starting your taste buds for the entree to come.