The Butter Cook Book

by MONICA CAVARZAN

(AUTHOR SIGNED VERSION EXCLUSIVE TO LARD ASS)

Extent: 240 pp
Format: Hardback
Size: 26.7 x 21.7 cm

You might think you know about butter. Turns out, most of us barely know butter at all!

Monica however, has spent more than a decade getting to know it extraordinarily well. For years, she wished there was a book that brought it all together. Then, completely out of the blue, Smith Street Books asked if she’d like to write one.

She’d thought about it plenty of times, but between running a butter factory and everything else life throws, writing a book had always felt slightly impossible.

But, through the winter of 2025, Monica spent her weekends holed up in a silent butter factory with a small heater on, disappearing down some truly wonderful buttery rabbit holes...

Butter taxes that built church towers.
Butter used to sample perfume.
The rather questionable table manners that gave us the butter knife.

And that’s just the beginning. For such a humble ingredient, butter has found itself tangled up in an extraordinary amount of history, politics, religion and ritual.

The Butter Cookbook is the book Monica always wished existed.

“This book is my ode to butter. After more than ten years of churning it, shaping it, cooking with it and sharing it, I wanted to create a book that showed why butter deserves to be seen as so much more than something you just spread on toast.”

RECIPES FROM MONICA’S TABLE

The recipes come from Monica’s life: growing up with farm-churned butter, dishes her family made, food her own children grew up eating and the things she still loves to cook today.

This is butter with a story. Butter with history. Butter made, melted, browned, baked, churned and celebrated as it bloody well should be.

The butter book you’ll soon wonder how you ever did without.

PRE-ORDER IS NOW OPEN.
BOOKS SHIPPING 6th OCTOBER.

'PICKUP' Orders available on the next market days after 6th October.
Note: Single books ship at a special subsidised rate of $9.95