Quatre Pattes

I can tell you exactly when the cows had been confined to their quarters for the winter. Not only was it the heavy fall of snow we had last week that gave me a clue, but I knew as soon as my Monday morning butter landed on the table and I unwrapped the white paper to reveal the balmy fat.

For the first time in a year, the butter was pale yellow and nutty in flavour. We enjoy the most wonderful raw butter from high alpine pastured cows, but in the winter when the snow lies thick around us for four months, the pastures are home to skiers and boarders from far and wide. During the dark months the cows are tight inside their sheds, living off hay that was harvested with zest during a balmy August and September. All summer, next to the milking sheds on the valley floor, two fields of maize have been growing. This cow chow, reaped in early autumn, will now be supplementing the hay in the cattlles’ troughs.

We have to wait for the turning of the year and the return of the sun over the high mountain peaks until our cows are driven up to the high pastures and our butter turns golden again. It is the lush, green, rapidly-growing spring grass and flowers that turn the butter golden via hundreds of pink udders. I look forward to the morning when my butter is unwrapped and shines like the sun at noon again.

I can understand why locals gave the returning of the spring butter such mystical and spiritual connotations in tmes past; lighting candles of butter fat throughout the winter to see to the safe return of their most nutritious food - truly the giver of life and health. Cows returning from the alpages in late autumn were given similar reverance.

Pale butter is a sign of the deepening of winter, the darkening days that mark out the turning year here in the mountains. In the market, local vegetables are becoming more scarce, fat ducks and chickens are making an appearance on the shelves of the supermarket and special offers on stock pot veg are all around. We are warming ourselves for the winter; making more tartiflette (warm potatoes, melted cheese and bacon) chopping our wood for the fire in earnest and generally closing in to await the snow that will lie on the ground here at 1,000 metres from mid-December to mid-April. Things are slowing, the cows, sheep and goats have been hidden away from the fields and we are settling in too.

Whilst others wait for midwinter, yule or Christmas to mark the turning of the year, here in the mountains, our year has already passed and it is now a long, dark wait until the return of the golden butter, on which we can strengthen ourselves for the new season.

About the Author...

I am an english mummy living in the french Alps, I am a nourisher to my dear other half and two girls of five and two. I am just about to start homeschooling the girls and we aim to travel around Europe with them next year. We follow the WAP diet and live a slow life up here in the mountains.