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Thoughts Sparked By My Butter Dish
The importance of respecting and learning from diverse cultures
This morning I took my butter dish out. It’s a ceramic dish with a cover and I love it. It’s practical and useful and I like the elegant design. There are ridges in the dish so you can easily store the butter, with room left to also store the little butter knife.
Looking at the dish — I remembered growing up in New York City with Indian parents.
Until I got married, I never thought of such things as butter dishes.
Growing up, my parents used ghee, which Mom stored in glass jars. In India, visiting my grandparents, I saw that my grandmother kept both her ghee and her yogurt in clay pots.
This made me realize that different cultures have different customs.
Living in America, I now use a covered butter dish, but my Mom still cooks with ghee and still keeps it in a covered glass jar.
I also started to use a knife and fork after I saw friends do it. I actually learned to use chopsticks before I learned how to use a knife and fork. This is because my folks used only spoons. They mainly used the fingers of just their right hand to eat.
