Butter and Margarine

Butter is the densest everyday calorie in the fridge, about 100 calories a tablespoon, and the one that makes stored beans, rice and bread into food people will keep eating. Fresh butter is a fridge and freezer item. The pantry versions are ghee, which is butter with the water and milk solids cooked out, and commercially canned butter, and those are what belong in the deep store.

Salted butter keeps longer than unsalted; the salt slows spoilage, which is why it was salted in the first place. Buy it by the pound when it's on sale and freeze it in the wrapper inside a freezer bag. Margarine keeps longer than butter in the fridge, 6 months against 1 to 3, because it has no milk solids to sour, but it brings nothing butter does not. For the pantry: ghee in a sealed jar, or canned butter, which is real butter sealed in a can and good for years unopened.

Wrapped tight, because butter takes on the smell of whatever sits next to it, and in the coldest part of the fridge. For the freezer, leave the wrapper on and add a freezer bag; a pound frozen today is at full quality for 6 to 9 months and safe well beyond. A covered butter dish on the counter is an old habit that works for a few days in a cool kitchen with salted butter; in a warm kitchen, or in an outage, keep it in the fridge. Ghee and canned butter live in the pantry, cool and dark, and go into the fridge once opened.

Butter that has turned is darker at the edges than in the middle, smells sour or like crayons, and tastes rancid; that last test is safe with butter in a way it's not with oil. Margarine goes the same way. Mold on butter is rare but means the whole block goes. Ghee that smells sharp or sour has turned.

About a tablespoon a person a day turns a stored-food diet from grim to normal: on bread, in rice, in beans, in oatmeal. To make ghee from a sale on butter, melt a pound slowly, skim the foam, pour the clear fat off the white solids at the bottom, and seal it in a clean jar; it keeps for months at room temperature and does not burn in the pan the way butter does. Canned butter opens to a normal stick of butter and goes in the fridge from there.

Butter is one of the last things in a warm fridge to worry about. The field guide puts hard cheeses, butter and margarine on the keep-it list after an outage: salted butter that spent a day above 40°F is still fine if it smells clean. Move the frozen pounds to the fridge as ice packs and they keep the rest cold a little longer.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.