In third grade, Mr. Unruh, the teacher who we then called a hippie due to his beard and propensity for wearing plaid, filled a jar with cream, screwed on the lid and passed it around the classroom. The jar passed from child to child, who each gave it a good few minutes of shaking before passing it on. Shaken and shaken again, the liquid began to thicken, congeal, and form a hard, irregular lump of fresh butter that we then put on the whole-wheat pancakes Mr. Unruh was cooking up for us.
The butter making and classroom-prepared breakfast was a demonstration of measurement, solids and liquids, cause and affect that fed our hunger on several levels. It was the first time I realized butter came from cream, and thus probably cows, having made it that far without questioning the source of the bright yellow cubes that came in a box in the refrigerator.
At that age, I happily spread butter on toast, English muffins, and white rice. I liked pale foods, filled with starch, a once typical American diet I’ve been undoing for 20 years.
While in India, I spread clarified butter, ghee, on crumbly millet bread made by a local who sits outside the yoga studio with a bin full of modern, health conscious and often hard-to-find-while-in-India Western food: raw honey, tahini, soy milk, wheat bread, tofu.
Butter seems a silly option in the land of ghee, and it’s not uncommon. But when given a choice, here I choose ghee. It tastes great, and the Ayurvedic approach to health certainly finds many applications for ghee. But I eat ghee as much as a symbol of the possibility for ever-increasing clarity that something free of solids and less apt to burn, holds. I might even have become a person of whom my remembered version of Mr Unruh would approve.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
