By James Kent
My family are devoted fans of FX/Hulu’s “The Bear.” It’s one of the few shows the four of us watch together. My 16 and 12-year-old don’t share much in common, but they love “The Bear.” So, as you might imagine, we were all ready to binge season 3 when it premiered this summer at the end of June.
In this season’s third episode, something happens that forever changed my meaning of the word quest. On the show, Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, is a Chicago chef who’s just opened his new restaurant, The Bear, in honor of his late brother. Carmy is a perfectionist with an unhealthy obsession with that term, and he isn’t shooting for any old restaurant; he’s looking for a star—a MICHELIN star. Carmy’s “Uncle Jimmy” is bankrolling the endeavor and is none too happy about the skyrocketing costs. In a now-famous scene, Uncle Jimmy decries the outrageous $11,000 bill for the restaurant’s butter. Carmy tries to explain to Uncle Jimmy that it isn’t any ordinary butter; it’s Orwellian butter, which Uncle Jimmy misinterprets as some bizarre dystopian butter. “No,” Carmy explains, “It’s from Orwell, Vermont.’
After the episode, my wife looked at me, and I looked at her, and we knew some research was in order. A reference to butter in Orwell couldn’t be a coincidence. This informational nugget had to have a deeper connection to the real world of cuisine. The two of us broke out our iPhones in a race to see who could conjure up the truth behind this “Orwellian” butter the quickest.
It did not take long for either of us to discover the truth about “The Bear’s” fictional account of rare-element butter making in Vermont. The true story is that such a place in Orwell supplied a couple of fine dining establishments in America. A restaurant in Sonoma, California, called The French Laundry, appears in the fictional world of “The Bear,” and receives this culinary mystery from Orwell. The Animal Farm Creamery in Orwell, Vermont, sold its business in 2022 to new owners from nearby Shoreham. However, its cultured butter from a small herd of 12 Jersey cows still exists and supplies chef Tomas Keller’s The French Laundry and New York City’s Per Se.
Okay. So, now that my wife and I know this butter exists, and exists in Vermont, we were determined to try it at all costs. But wait a second. If Carmy’s butter bill was over $11,000, how much does this stuff cost anyway? The answer: a lot. I’ll get to that.
It was the first week of July, and my wife had time off from work. Going on a tip (I have yet to learn where she got this tip from), she thought the Middlebury Food Co-op might carry the butter. Aside from the co-op, the only place to get their hands on some of this butter is through a cheesemonger in New York City. That was an intriguing piece of information, but we decided to try our luck with the co-op. No dice. The co-op was a false lead.
With available time to kill, my wife and I decided to take an excursion to Shoreham. Indeed, if we just showed up at the Animal Farm Creamery in Shoreham, they’d have to sell us some butter, right? Wrong. There was a farm, but nowhere could we find a farm stand attached to the farm where balls of magical butter awaited us. Strike two!
Undeterred by our failures, I would get my hands on some of this butter, no matter the cost. At this point in the story, you may wonder if my wife thought I was crazy. She supported my quest, perhaps fueling and encouraging it beyond a point of reason, so no. She was as unhinged about this butter as I was—our next stop: Saxelby Cheese. I suppose cheese and butter are cousins, so it shouldn’t surprise that this retailer would be the lone distributor of Animal Farm Creamery butter outside the high-end restaurants I mentioned. They were it. Every two weeks, on a Friday at approximately 3 p.m. ET, any regular person without chef credentials can place an online order for precisely one pound of Animal Farm Creamery butter for the retail-low price of $60 a pound. That is not a typo. It’s $60 a pound, and they don’t even give you a free t-shirt to go with it. The $60 does not include overnight shipping, which, for our location, costs an additional $30.
I know. It’s ridiculous. I live in Rutland, and I literally can drive to the farm, and the only way I can get my hands on this butter is to place an online order to a cheese distributor in NYC and then have them ship the butter that comes from Vermont to my home—in Vermont. And that’s if I could even get an order through, which turns out to be more challenging than I ever imagined.
Saxelby takes online orders through one tiny window of opportunity, and if you aren’t there at 3 p.m., you are out of luck. The first couple of times I tried, I forgot to log in at 3 p.m. And trust me, 15 minutes late is too late. Five minutes is too late. One minute is too late. Even logging in at 3 p.m. turns out to be too late.
I don’t know how much butter Saxelby’s has for sale every two weeks, but it sure isn’t much, and many people out there are as crazy to try this butter as I am. All summer long, I tried, and all summer long, I struck out. Too many strikes for me. I had to hang up my butter-ordering apron and hand the reins over to my wife. Perhaps she’d have better luck.
Her first attempt went a lot better than mine. She created an account and hit the refresh button on the site for several minutes leading up to 3 p.m. She got in. She was ordering the butter. All the toll gates lifted. Dreams of Orwellian butter danced in our dystopian culinary minds. Then, boom. The dream collapsed. Some strange quirk in the Saxleby ordering system didn’t like the way my wife imported her phone number. It rejected her. By the time she’d corrected her mistake, a message indicated it was too late. Try again in two weeks.
You’d imagine, by this point, it was time to give up. Why would a site grant you the ability to purchase $60 a pound butter, plus another $30 shipping, and then take it all away due to its desire to have you put parenthesis around an area code?How dare you, Saxleby Cheese, how dare you!
But did you think we were going to stop at this point? Oh no. This situation quickly became a Clarke Griswold Wally World quest for fun. No one was going to stop us from getting our butter.Two weeks later, my wife tried again. She was successful. One week later, we had a box filled with ice and four balls of Vermont’s finest and most expensive butter.
That evening, I was in Pawlet and stopped by Mach’s Market to pick up some dinner and a fresh-baked baguette. Have you ever been to Mach’s Market? Let me say this about Mach’s Market: if you can get to Pawlet, you must go here because the food is sensational. I swear this isn’t an ad; it’s a genuine endorsement—I’m a fan.
Now, the moment of truth. After months of trial and mostly error, it was time to discover why Carmy insisted on nothing besides Orwellian butter from Vermont. The four balls of butter are different from the usual store-bought variety. They come bearing an intense yellow color and a velvety texture that glistens in the light. Next is the smell. Does butter have a scent? It does if it’s $60 a pound butter. Plus shipping! Don’t forget the shipping. The aroma of this Animal Farm Creamery butter is the scent of significance. You wouldn’t spread this on any regular slice of Wonder Bread. We heated up our Mach’s Market baguette, spread some butter along its warm, crusty nooks, and bit into our bread.
Is the caviar of butter like sampling some rare, expensive vintage of wine? Was my palate refined enough to differentiate this from my everyday cooking butter, or would my brain accommodate for all the suffering and cost that went into its procurement and create an experience worthy of its uniqueness? Would my mind lie and tell me this was the most incredible tasting butter I’ve ever had, just so I wouldn’t be let down? I can say this for sure—it was damn fine butter, and the whole family agreed. Over the course of a weekend, we sampled the butter several times, going through two of these precious balls of four by the time Monday morning rolled around.
For fun, I cooked an omelet with it in the style of one made in “The Bear’s” second season. It was in the taste of that omelet where the true potential of this butter shined the most. I could make the greatest chocolate chip cookie known to man if I could afford several more pounds of this churned elixir.
On Monday morning, I brought a ball of butter to the Mountain Times. Sharing is caring, after all. I wanted everyone to experience a taste of this butter, which became my ultimate quest. I procured another baguette, this time from our next-door neighbors, the Dream Maker Bakers in Killington. (You know, the folks who made the world’s largest whoopie pie?) I’ll also tell you they make a pretty darn tasty baguette. And that’s not an ad, that’s an endorsement — and a fact.
The butter was a hit around the Mountain Times office. Again, whether or not people thought it was the best butter they’d ever tasted, they all appreciated getting the opportunity to sample the most prized butter in all of America.
I’m down to one ball left. We’re supposed to be saving it so my sister can sample it when she visits from Massachusetts in a few weeks to see the Rutland Halloween parade. I hope it’s still there when she comes, but it’s going to be hard not to resist the lure of Carmy’s butter.
