The Cossacks are credited with inventing butter but in this context inventing is hardly the right word: the sewing machine was invented -- butter was found. Those hardy horsemen lived mainly on meat and milk and when they set out in the morning to go hunting or whatever, they always carried a quantity of milk in a round leather bag.

In the course of the day and with all the travelling, the milk produced a kind of cream and as the day went on this cream produced something like butter.

It might be only in fragments but if the day went on long enough, it formed into a kind of loaf. This was butter. They learned how to use it and how to preserve it and so they must get some credit for being the pioneers of butter.

Of course all this could have happened long before in China because there is a famous Chinese proverb which says: "Put butter near the fire and it will melt." Indeed everything seems to have been discovered in China long before the rest of the world. That is why Napoleon said: "If China reawakens, the rest of the world had better watch out." It could be happening this very day.

Butter has been known in Ireland since as far back as we can trace. They preserved it in oak casks very deep down in the bog. Sometimes turfcutters come upon some of those casks and the butter is still amazingly pure because the bog has great preservative qualities.

When I was growing up in Kerry, butter was a great part of the industry.

Most households made their own. On a Friday -- you will see why -- milk was placed in wide shallow dishes, made of course by our friends the Travellers. These pans were placed in a quiet room known as the dairy.

They were allowed to lay there until Tuesday evening, when the cream was skimmed off and put into a round barrel called a churn.

This was agitated with a handle and in time it separated the cream into a kind of loaf and the milk was taken off. This was called buttermilk. Pigs especially loved it. It was called the pigs' Champagne.

The butter was gathered over the week and taken to the market on Thursday. There in front of the Market House it was sold and in the old days sent by a horse and cart to Cork. Usually it needed two horses and a stopover at halfway.

Sometimes it was a whole day's journey. The butter was loaded onto the cross-channel boats and most of it taken to Cardiff and elsewhere in Wales.

Some of the butter sold in Castle Island was taken to Tralee and shipped to as far as Glasgow. This was all the custom until the combustion engine changed the whole world. Then the lorry and the van replaced the horses and the export of butter to Britain increased.

My father worked on the lorry that took the butter from Currow to Fenit Port and sometimes, when the boat wasn't ready there was a delay and my father was late coming home and he would always say "Butter going out". This was a cant word in our house and sometimes when his lateness had nothing to do with ships or sailing but he was nevertheless late, my mother used to say "We know. Butter going out".

Some of the most powerful food companies in the world have employed the best of intelligence to find a substitute.

They have used animal fats and vegetable fats and various combinations but there is still a hard line of people who will tell you "butter is the cream".

In our locality most people in the town had their friends or their cousins in the country who supplied them with butter. Of course the butter varied in quality. Indeed the better off people would pay big money for special kinds of butter. This was the butter made from Kerry cows.

They were a small hardy breed who could find food where ordinary cows couldn't and it gave their butter a special flavour.

Long ago we sold our butter in the market like most people and of course we kept enough for the household. Some evenings my mother would say: "We'll make a little fresh bit of butter for our supper." Then a few pints of cream were put into a round tin gallon with a tightly fixed cover. We hadn't a churn so we had to make our butter by hand.

You shook and shook the gallon and it seemed a very long time before any change within.

Suddenly after what seemed an infinity you heard a sweet sound from the gallon as the liquid came away on its own. You knew then that you were winning and after a few more shakes could hear the loaf forming.

This was taken out and the buttermilk was shared amongst us all. That butter was used with the bread for the tea and there was nothing ever more delicious. The butter made in the gallon seemed to be superior to the butter made in the churn but that, of course, was pure imagination.

There are people up in the mountains who make butter from goats' milk but I have yet to taste it. It is probably very much in demand by the very wealthy, and the popular cheese Roquefort is made from sheep's milk.

At least in one aspect my county is famous: many people have heard of Kerry Gold.

Fogra: This has been a special week for Ryan O'Hanrahan of Dundalk -- I send him my best wishes.

- Con Houlihan