It was said long before me by Julia Child and others, “Margarine is not an edible food product.” My innate good sense and experience told me that was true.
From my introduction to it during the Depression days when Wisconsin dairy law ruled the country and margarine could not be sold colored yellow to look like butter, I was certain that I should not be spreading that ugly stuff on hot toast or cool bread.
Margarine was sold in a plastic sack, all white and sick looking like poor quality lard and inside this sack was a capsule with yellow dye in it. To prepare this imitation butter, one crushed the capsule, releasing the yellow dye and then kneading the whole mess to make the yellow spread through the stuff.
Then one formed the package into a cube or as near as one could get to that shape, put the margarine in the refrigerator until it hardened, then cut off the plastic and cut the mess into pieces almost resembling butter.
The advantage to this was its cheapness. I don’t remember what it cost because butter was only twenty-five cents a pound at that time. Fortunately, it never became popular in our homes (my parents’ and my grandparents,’ where I spent a lot of time).
My grandmother got some butter from a Skandia farm and it was mostly round in shape and only slightly yellow in color, not at all like the artificial margarine color. It was smooth and when you tasted a piece of it, you could tell easily that it had been fresh, thick cream very recently. Unfortunately, some butter is now treated with a yellow color to make it look richer, more like margarine.
The current culprit, and a serious one apparently, is what we call trans fat, short for transitional fatty acid—a fat that is in transition from liquid to solid. Bubbling hydrogen through vegetable oils causes the oils to solidify into trans fat. This process prevents oils from going rancid on the shelf and yields a product which holds up in deep frying. It is widely used.
Some of these trans fats occur naturally, but, according to Restaurant Business magazine, eighty percent of them are man-made.
I suppose that as long as mankind has been preparing and selling food, it has tried in some way to make it look like something it was not. During Martin Luther’s time in Germany, millers of flour sometimes would add ashes or other adulterants to stretch the flour being sold.  In one European country, the penalty for adulterating flour was death.
As time passed, skills improved and cheating methods became ever more sophisticated.
It is increasingly difficult to produce foods which are mostly “natural”—whatever that means these days. If a recipe has three or four ingredients, chances are that somewhere in one or more of them are additives adulterating the product…such as sugar in canned tomatoes or the required “nutrients” in U.S. white flour, allegedly to replace those lost by bleaching the flour.
It is true that whole wheat flour has more nutrients to start than does white flour, but in the passage through the digestive system, whole wheat products move along more quickly before all the nutrients have a chance to get absorbed by our digestive systems…thus white flour which moves slow through our systems actually sheds as many nutrients, or even more in the case of some products, as does the more “healthy” whole wheat flour.
Having said this about “unclean” foods, I thought it might be a good idea to pass along some simple recipes for good foods which have no or almost no additives, are simple to make and good for your heath.
These are recipes mostly relying on olive oil, butter, cream and Parmesan cheese to produce something very tasty and very good for you. There is nothing wrong with all these rich ingredients except over-eating. Taken in moderation, they will not make you fat. If you are on a weight loss diet which fears cream, butter, cheese, potatoes, bread and other basics of human life, I feel sorry for you.
If you must lose weight for style reasons, I suggest ignoring the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Mid-Atlantic Diet, the New Hebrides Diet and the Fiji Island Diet. What these diets do so well is make a lot of money for their promoters.
If you want to lose weight and be able to eat most of the good food available to you, go to Weight Watchers, which essentially is my father’s original diet hammered into me as a child: “don’t eat so much, boy.” So, pay attention, don’t eat so much and enjoy these simple recipes.

Quick Lunch Spaghetti
These ingredients are enough for two people and go well with a piece of roasted chicken, stashed in the refrigerator from the night before.
1/2 tablespoon of good, unsalted butter
1/2 tablespoon of olive oil
1/3 cup of coarsely chopped Prosciutto or a good quality ham will do
1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup grated good quality Parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper
5 ounces of thin (No. 11) spaghetti, cooked, kept warm
Heat butter and oil together in a medium sauté pan, quickly add the chopped Prosciutto. Stir to brown just a bit, then add the cream, stir and heat, next add cheese, stir and heat, add pepper to color. Now quickly add the cooked pasta, mix well with the sauce and serve.
You can serve more cheese on the side if you wish. You also can color the dish with some medium chopped roasted red peppers.

Two simple sauces for fettuccine
These two sauces are simple to make and taste amazingly good. It is true that their ingredients might have a few calories and some amount of cholesterol, but there is no trans fat here.
Again, if you don’t overeat, everything will be fine. Note that there is nothing added to any of the ingredients.
A note of caution for the whipping cream, however, is in order. Read the ingredient label carefully for this item; to the best of my knowledge the only heavy cream available in our area which has no additives is Jilbert’s.

Fettuccine al Burro
(pasta with butter and cheese)
1/4 pound of butter, softened
1/4 cup of heavy cream
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
additional cheese
Cream the butter in a bowl; beat in the cream a little at a time, then very gradually beat in the cheese. Set aside.
Put a large serving bowl in the oven to warm.
Cook the fettuccine and drain it well. Now place the pasta in the warm serving bowl. Add the butter and cheese mixture and toss until it melts and coats the noodles. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Serve with additional cheese.
For color, you might add some chopped Italian parsley or thinly sliced Greek olives.

Egg and Cream Sauce
5 egg yolks
1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
10 tablespoons heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
Whisk egg yolks well; stir in cream, salt and pepper. In large skillet melt a thin layer of butter, add the cooked and drained pasta to the pan and add about two tablespoons of butter in chunks, over medium heat.
Pour in the sauce, turn gently over heat to coat the pasta, salt and pepper to taste. Add color with a few finely chopped green onion tops.

Here is the last one for this column. This is a traditional Italian dish and, if made properly, is wonderfully tasty.

Fettuccine with Chicken Liver Sauce
Cook enough fettuccine for two and keep it warm.
1 pound chicken livers
salt and pepper to taste
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup of dry Marsala wine
1/2 teaspoon dry sage leaves, crushed
1/2 cup of heavy cream
2 tablespoons of finely chopped Italian parsley
Cut the livers into three or four pieces each and sprinkle with salt and pepper. In large skillet melt butter and sauté livers just until the raw redness is gone.
Pour on the Marsala, raise heat to medium high and reduce liquid by cooking three or four minutes. Lower heat and add sage. Stir cream into the chicken livers and bring to boil.
Reduce heat at once and simmer for about two minutes. Pour over noodles and garnish with parsley.

Prepare these recipes with great care and enjoy them in intelligent moderation. Life can be good, but without good food, it is only mediocre.
—Don Curto

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