Did Julia Child Know About These Things?
Don’t make fun of butter sculptures as hopelessly hick: they have a serious purpose, as Natalie Shapero points out: ‘Pamela Simpson, author of “Corn Palaces and Butter Queens,” does a nice job of tracing these installations back to a period in the 1870s when Kansas, then recently plagued by drought, was desperate to prove the vitality of its crops to the rest of the country by embracing what now seems crass and misguided. Enormous and enormously wasteful displays–the U.S. Capitol rendered in apples, a multigrain Liberty Bell with a gourd for a clapper–seemed the best way to say to the country, “Buy some land in Kansas, and you’ll have more crops than you know what to do with.‒ I wish 4-H would sponsor butter-sculpture contests.
