I love butter. Butter is one of the joys of being alive. Butter on toast. Butter on freshly baked white bread. Butter on pancakes. Butter with kaya, jam or marmalade. And that’s just butter straight up. We haven’t even delved into the pastries.

But just to share, I once spread a slice of bread thickly with butter, piled on a stack of sliced black olives and ate the whole thing as a sandwich.

It was quite sickening.

Anyway. I was having lunch at Maxwell with my colleagues and this middle-aged uncle sat down opposite us. My eyes darted over curiously when his coffee was served, because it came with a saucer that held a teaspoon and a slice of butter. I was wondering if he likes oily coffee when he lifted the slice and took a bite of it. Interesting.

It was not a huge slice, just like one of those you get in kopitiam-style kaya toast. I didn’t quite dare stare too hard as he was staring at us too (perhaps we were bitching too vehemently). But I was really tempted to, cos I’ve never seen anyone eat butter like that or order a piece to eat the way he did. I wonder how much it cost.

Then upon coming back to the office and my aimless net-surfing, I read in NYT an article about the art of using butter in baking.

“Butter has that razor melting point,” said Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and author of the recently published “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking” (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.

“Once butter is melted, it’s gone,” said Jennifer McLagan, author of the new book “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

Interesting? Read on here.