What's So Great about Lurpak?

So Victor and I were in one of the nice neighborhood grocery stores I've started to trek out to (it was Andy's Fruit Ranch, on Kedzie near Lawrence), and noticed this Danish butter.

I should say right out, I'm a butter lover. You won't find margarine in my house; my mother can insist all she likes. Nothing will convince me that butter is bad. Luckily, Victor agrees with me on this, though for cooking we tend more toward olive oil than butter as a sauteing medium.

So after years of buying Land o' Lakes, or whatever organic product was available (when we were feeling flush) or whatever was cheapest (when we weren't), we decided to splurge on Lurpak, which we had seen before, and heard about (as in, "I knew it was a decent supermarket when I saw Lurpak in the cooler"), but never tried. When I saw the price (something like $3.69), for a moment I imagined it was cheaper than the more run-of-the-mill stuff I was used to (for which I've gotten accustomed to paying around five bucks), and then I realized that the Lurpak package contained only a half pound.

Ouch!

Still, we splurged. And it was good.

How good? Well, despite my fondness for butter, I'm not a connoisseur. There are doubtless specialized terms that demarcate the boundary between the good and the really good. One thing, though, is that it's remarkably creamy. Just out of the refrigerator, you can spread it on toast without much trouble (as opposed to a stick of Land o' Lakes, which is damned hard when it comes out of the fridge). It tastes great on toast.

But, finally, not great enough to spend almost twice as much for it. I might buy it again when we expect houseguests--guests we expect to serve buttered bread. Otherwise, when I'm feeling flush I'll buy organic.