Dadgum That Murphy!

When I was a kid we ate ‘butter’ out of a carton. It was smooth and came to a little peak in the middle like a Dairy Queen cone.

It was not until I was an adult that I realize this for the farce that it was. That creamy fake yellow stuff was decidedly NOT butter. It was a substitute, with a pale resemblance to the original; an impostor.

You might think I am going somewhere deep with this. That the above paragraph is a metaphor for some great life lesson.

I’m sorry to disappoint you. This really is about butter.

Since I became an adult and was responsible for my own culinary choices, I have always chosen the real thing. Butter, real butter. In the rectangle shape, with all its hard-to-spread loveliness.

Since I love real butter, I have always needed a nice pretty container to hold it in. Enter the butter dish.

I have had many butter dishes in my time. I have had some funky ones.


I have had some antique ones.


I have even had ugly ones that matched that first set of Correlle dishes I picked up at the Salvation Army store for a song.


They have all been broken. I don’t understand this phenomenon. Butter dishes never last in this house. It is as if they spontaneously combust upon entry to my home.

I went to Wal-Mart and bought this one.


I hate this one. It has no handle with which to easily remove the top. It’s boring and always smudgy with greasy fingerprints.

I have had it for 2 years. This will be the last butter dish I ever buy. Even though it is made of glass and as such, extremely fragile, it has lasted. It has lasted because I hate it.

It is Murphy’s Law.



*By way of a disclaimer, these are not actual butter dishes I have owned. I started my obsession with butter dishes long before my need to chronicle everthing on the internet, these are simply a sample of the style of butter dishes I have loved and lost.