Dexter S Huntsman

The Protestant Reformation was a butter dispute, and there is a 250ft stone tower in Rouen, paid for out of the fines, to prove it. The medieval Church banned animal foods through Lent and on a great many days besides: no meat, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter, for something like a third of the year. In Rome this was painless. Rome cooked in olive oil and had done since the Caesars. A cardinal could keep a perfect fast without changing his dinner. North of the Alps there are no olive trees. A Norman or a Saxon who obeyed the rule had to buy oil that had come over the mountains by cart, months old and frequently rancid, from merchants who knew exactly what the calendar was worth to them. The alternative was lard, which was banned too. Or you could pay. The Church sold permission slips to go on eating butter through the fast, and Normandy, which is a dairy with a coastline, bought them by the cartload. Rouen's cathedral put the money into a new tower between 1485 and 1506. It is still called the Tour de Beurre. Bourges has one as well. In 1520 a German monk put it in print. Rome, wrote Martin Luther, laughs at its own fasts, makes foreigners eat oil it would not grease its boots with, and then sells them leave to eat butter. Within a generation the butter countries had gone: northern Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England. The oil countries stayed loyal to a man. France, which cooks in both, had a civil war about it. Five hundred years later the people who cook in olive oil are once again explaining to the people who cook in butter that theirs is the sinful fat. The indulgence is now sold as a Mediterranean diet cookbook.