Bog Butter

1. I am genuinely suprised and disappointed that Food: Butter does not have any sub-categories. I suggest for this idea Food: Butter: packaging.

2. Bog butter is widely known to exist, but only as an antiquarian curiosity, and not as a comestible. Also production seems to have stopped some time ago.

3. Gourmet butter is widely known to exist, in the form of organic butter, unpasteurised butter with hand-chipped free-range himalayan sea salt crystals individually applied to the surface of each pat, and single-origin butter from cattle grazing rare-breed-grass meadows, etc.

I propose a new home delivery service offering newly manufactured bog butter. The butter is sourced from the highest quality and most expensive dairy herds, and is hand churned etc. etc. and then packaged in beautifully handcrafted wooden pots. The pots are then embeded in specially cut slices of bog. The bog is sliced using a coring machine; a core about 30cm diameter and 6ocm deep is extracted from the bog, and then a smaller core about 20cm diameter is extracted from the larger core. The ends of the smaller core are sliced off to form lids. Then the two circular lids, and the annular larger core, can be assembled in a sturdy clear glass container, with the wooden pot safely nestled within (the size of the pot and the size of the cores should be matched so that the pot is tightly embedded within the turf). Spare bog water can be used to top up the packaging to the optimum moisture content before fixing down the glass lid somewhat like a Kilner jar. A very discrete printed label is fixed on the outside before the whole thing is packaged ina sturdy carton for shipping.

The butter connoiseur can either open the entire thing at once and serve it as is, perhaps with the wooden pot resting on a heap of the turf, as an unusual dinner-table centrepiece. Or, perhaps collectors will start buying this fresh and laying it down in cellars, anticipating a secondary market of fine aged bog butters. Only the real investors with a long-term outlook will be able to wait for a couple of thousand years for the real distinctive flavours to develop, but I think it should be rather nice even if eaten a bit young.