A few months ago I read Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which is advertised as "the cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer, and the journalist intent on cracking her case".
I heard about it from my friend, who picked it up in a bookshop. She said the bookshop lady described it as "unhinged" – a description which naturally intrigued my friend, and in turn, me.
I was also intrigued by a quote which appears on the back cover. The (alleged) serial killer Manako Kajii tells the journalist, Rika:
there are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.
I'm okay with feminists – I'd say I'm one myself – but as long-time readers of this blog may recall, I don't like margarine either.
Butter has some excellent descriptions of food, including, as you would expect, butter. Kajii sings the praises of Échiré, an expensive French brand, and Rika decides to buy it. ("In the Échiré butter shop, which looked like a fancy boutique, she bought a pat of butter that cost almost 1,000 yen for just 100 grams. Never before had Rika spent that kind of money on ingredients.")
I don't recall trying Échiré before, so I bought it too, all the while wondering how many other readers have done the same. The Échiré was almost three times the price of the supermarket's own-brand butter (pictured below).
The photo is from a blind test which my friend and I conducted. We were both able to identify the Échiré with no difficulty whatsoever: it's a more complex and pleasing taste. But we also concluded that it's too expensive for regular use. Now we both use Président, another French brand which is priced somewhere in between. Perhaps not as good as Échiré, but it's good enough.
