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The kitchen was insufferably hot, so I had been zoning out a little (okay, a lot) during a demonstration at culinary school when I heard my chef-instructor say, with plain indifference, “We are oozing butter with the Gratin Dauphinois.”

Oozing butter?  It seemed like an awfully colloquial thing to say, especially considering he’s French, and the French are anything but colloquial.  I had to agree with him, though.  The Dauphinois looks and tastes like a dairy factory exploded on an unexpecting potato farm.  “If I eat that whole thing,” I thought, “butter’ll be coming out of my pores, too.” I straightened and kept listening.

“So we are only oozing the butter in this way: we rub it all over the bottom of the pan.”

Oh!  We were using butter, not oozing it.  Sometimes his accent is just too thick to decipher.  I chuckled, which got me a dirty look, and then continued to watch as he coated the pan in garlic, then layered it with thinly sliced potato rounds, heavy cream spiked with nutmeg and cayenne, and gruyere cheese.  He covered it with tin foil and let it bake in the oven for about 40 minutes before taking it out and spooning some onto a platter.  It looked decadent and rich and utterly artery-clogging, and it was, by all accounts, oozing.

We use butter in everything at culinary school.  We love butter.  In another interestingly composed sentence, Chef recently explained that “When we cook, there is always fat involved.”  My favorite butter-heavy recipe is for a sauce beurre blanc, which lists the ingredients as follows: 30 grams of shallots, 50 milliliters of white wine vinegar, 150 milliliters of white wine and 200 grams of butter.  If that doesn’t sound good, then I don’t know what does. 

I should preface the rest of this column by insisting that I’m not complaining: my father grew up on a dairy farm, and I’ve been known to load butter on my toast in the morning.  I once even ate a few bites from a stick of salted refrigerated butter, but that was when I was 4 years old, so don’t judge me too harshly.  I can do butter.  It’s just that I’ve never gotten so intimate with it.

Chef has a penchant for slicing off a hunk of the good stuff and breaking it apart with his hands before dropping it into the sauce – or gratin, or concentrated stock, or whatever.  He slides the fat in between his knuckles, almost as if he relishes the slippery feeling on his skin, and then slowly, reluctantly lets it fall into the pot.

At home, when I cook with butter, I use my knife to slice off a small piece, and usually then another not-so-small one.  I use the same knife to transfer the butter to the sauce or gratin or concentrated stock, and then, with a spatula, I gingerly scrape it into the pot with a small thud.  

There’s no time for that sort of nonsense in culinary school.  I learned very quickly that if I want to keep up, I have to use my hands.  Rather than run to the sink every five minutes (time-waster!) or wear gloves (despised by the culinary world for their impracticality), I’ve taken to wiping my buttery hands on the towel tucked into the apron around my waist.  Sometimes, when things get really crazy, I just wipe them on the apron.

And so I’ve given up the fight.  I use butter now with wild abandon, even convincing my fellow students that our recipes would benefit from just un peu more. When the class winds down at 11 each night, I’m unavoidably coated in butter.  It’s on my clothing, lightly coating my neck.  Once, I even found a chunk of it in my hair.  Yes, I have embraced butter.  One might even say I’m oozing it.