FLAVOR NOTES FOR BOG BUTTER. Joshua Levine article discusses the speculation that bog dwellers must have known that a bog would preserve a body buried in it because they made a practice of burying large amounts of butter in bogs. The butter is still being found thousands of years later. Levine’s article led me to this article by Jason Daley, entitled “A Brief History of Bog Butter”, also in Smithsonian (June 13, 2016). I have posted several times about bog butter, including this post on the speculation that bog butter was buried to improve the taste.
Daley’s article contains some flavor notes for bog butter. One museum curator said about a chunk of bog butter: “It did smell like butter, after I had held it in my hands, my hands really did smell of butter. There was even a smell of butter in the room it was in.†On the other hand, Daley says that a recent experiment by the Nordic Food Lab to reconstruct an ancient butter recipe resulted in “… flavor notes which were described primarily as ‘animal’ or ‘gamey’, ‘moss’, ‘funky’, ‘pungent’, and ‘salami’.â€