Big Paddle Keep on Churning
Big Paddle Keep On Churning
Admiral Biscuit
I’d heard lots of things about what life was like back in Ponyland. Equestria. Whatever they actually called it; there were a number of human names for their home . . . world (maybe it was their home country, nobody was really clear on that).
I hadn’t been there, so I couldn’t really say. Given their bright colors and dispositions, general adorableness, and overall cheeriness—not to mention, breaking out into song at the drop of a hat—it was easy to imagine many of those things were true.
It was also fair to say that it was easy, perhaps too easy, to imagine any visitor to what one might say was a first-world nation—to what, one might say, was the First World nation, the shining beacon on the hill—struggling with the technological prowess of such a nation, the sheer number of choices Freedom [eagle noise] provided, from three flavors of fuel at the gas pump (regular, mid-grade, or premium), to Starbucks on every corner, to Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate.
While I couldn’t be sure, it was likely that the situation was similar but reversed on the other end of the portal, the place where the ponies lived; after all, they had three tribes which holds to the rule of three. Four if you count the alicorns.
Five if you count zebras.
And then there are the other sapients, like—
What I’m saying is that cultural misunderstandings were sure to occur and any decent human wouldn’t mock a pony guest for, well, misunderstanding an aspect of human society.
Take naming. Whenever something new is discovered or featured in the news a lot, maybe in the newspaper back in the day or in bardic legends in the days before newspapers, people—or ponies—are going to get names inspired by that. Maybe something that’s lifted directly from it, or maybe something close.
And if the people—or ponies—don’t quite hit the mark, don’t quite get the nuance of the source material, that’s understandable.
Well, unless they tried too hard and then it was just cringe.
My roommate was named Velvet Elizabeth and she was a pony. A plain pony, an Earth pony, an aardepaard—not a unicorn or a pegasus. As normal as she could be, as long as one forgave the cream-colored coat or the autumn-orange mane and tail (with blonde highlights), the big blue eyes, and of course the cutie mark.
I wasn’t sure if Velvet was her family name or a given name; I knew that some societies put family names first. That she didn’t entirely understand the question, and then followed up with an explanation of ‘it’s complicated’ answered it for me.
(She hadn’t actually said ‘it’s complicated,’ but I’d mentally tuned out somewhere after unicorn Houses and earth pony landowners versus freeholders as it applied to a matrilineal society, as well as the effects of a cutie mark opposed to birth order.)
•••
We’d reached the point in our roomie relationship where I didn’t feel the need to show off or explain everything we humans had that didn’t exist in ponyland, or where she’d explain how her society did it differently. And wasn’t that the point of foreign exchange students? They get an immersion in a new society, a new culture, and everyone they encounter learns something, too? A different way of looking at the world?
I tried to imagine my former roomie—now entirely immersed, perhaps drowning, in Equestria, and came up a little short.
•••
Besides her own room, there was one room in the apartment that she had totally made her own. The kitchen.
I didn’t mind; I was a college student going on perpetual bachelor. If it didn’t microwave or have directions printed on the box, it was too complicated for me to fathom. She, on the other hand, would show up with saddlebags bursting with fresh veggies and produce and proceed to turn them into a huge variety of meals, which she graciously shared with me.
I’d started just giving her money to get stuff. It felt too slacker to just eat her food without contributing, and while there was a part of me who questioned the easy slip into normal gender roles vis her cooking the food, there was no question that she was far better at it than I was, that I was saving money by doing so (and, based on the veggies and roughage, eating healthier), and that I did perform the manly task of vacuuming and also changing the light bulb above the counter when it burned out because she could barely reach it with her hooves and even when she did hooves weren’t good at twisting out a bulb.
I swept up all the broken glass, too.
•••
There was no way of knowing what she would be making when I returned home after class. Or how she would be making it; while to the best of my knowledge there weren’t any stores actually selling pony-style kitchen appliances yet, anything different than a stainless-steel finished plug-in appliance might as well be pony tech as far as I was concerned.
Which is to say, I had no idea what sort of appliance she had on the kitchen counter.
“Yo, Liz.”
It had taken months for a nickname to settle in. Sometimes that was how it went; it had to feel right, and which name to play off of? Was it right to just call her Velvet? Or Elizabeth? Velve? Vel? Liz? Beth? Velbe?
“What’cha making?”
It looked kind of like pudding.
Pudding came in cups (individually packed, one serving per package) and could also be made out of boxes of pudding powder if the shelves in the grocery store were to be believed. Making it out of a box felt complicated so I never had.
“Butter.”
Obviously, I knew what butter was. I might not have been a chef, but I certainly knew what butter was. Even used it a time or two, although I preferred margarine since it spread more easily.
I also knew that you could get all the butter you wanted at the grocery store.
“Why?”
“’Cause I need butter.”
That was the obvious answer, and technically correct.
I stepped into the kitchen and studied the whirlygig thing she had. It looked like somebody had strapped an eggbeater onto a glass candy jar, the kind most often seen in the ‘guess how many Skittles and win a prize’ context.
I’d always wondered if there was some scientific method of approaching that problem.
“You could just buy it.”
“I don’t know where it comes from.”
“The dairy aisle,” I informed her.
Velvet Elizabeth stopped cranking her butter churn and gave me a withering glare. “I know they sell ‘butter’ (I could hear the air-quotes around the word) in the dairy aisle, I mean I don’t know where it comes from.
“I know that there’s a factory that takes milk and makes it into butter, but I don’t know where it is, and I don’t know what goes into it.”
“Nobody knows where food comes from,” I said.
“You can find out,” she told me. “If you ask, or read the label. Like those sea bugs you had last night—”
“Shrimp, please don’t call them bugs.”
“—those were from Venezuela.”
“Oh.”
“I bet you don’t even know where that is.”
“Central America,” I said proudly. “I paid attention in school. There’s an ocean on each side, that’s why they sell seafood.”
“It’s in South America.”
“Oh, right, I was thinking Costa Rica. Venezuela is where Eva Peron is from, she was in that musical about her.”
“Eva Peron was from Argentina. There’s literally songs about that in the musical.”
I crossed my arms. “Well, it’s easier for you. High school geography was years ago, that’s why I don’t remember where every country is. You’d have had to study up on it, since it’s a foreign world, like how I studied up on pony stuff.”
“Did you.”
“Yeah.”
She rolled her eyes and went back to churning her butter. “I bet you can’t name three countries on our planet.”
“Well, there’s Equestria, and the Crystal Empire, and, uh, Zebrica?”
“That last one was a lucky guess.”
“See, told you.” I opened the fridge to grab a drink, and then found that it was half full with quart-sized Mason jars full of milk.
I hoped it was milk. “What brought this on?”
“Well.” She went back to stirring. “I was going to just use store-bought milk to make my butter, ‘cause I tried some Imperial butter, figured it would be good since it had a crown on it.”
“I’m not sure that’s actually butter.”
“Neither am I.” She slowed down on the cranking and then stopped entirely. “There, that’s made. Sort of.” She went to grab a threadbare towel and a large mixing bowl. “Thing was that store bought milk didn’t work like it should have, so I got to researching to find out why. I’d thought that ‘pasteurized’ meant that the cows were out in a pasture, but it turns out that’s not what it means at all. It means that they heat the milk to kill everything in it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, it was named for the guy who invented the process. Louie Pasture or something like that, I think he was French.” Then the irony of the name caught me. “Maybe he was a pony instead, I don’t know. But it helped keep people from getting sick from drinking milk.”
“Well, it doesn't help with buttermaking, all the stuff you need is cooked out of the milk, or skimmed off the top.” She wrapped the butter up in the cloth and started squeezing it out.
I watched in wonder as milky water issued forth, and when she unwrapped the towel, it looked a lot like butter, and it smelled a lot like butter, too.
“So I had to figure out if I could get unpastured milk, from a proper pastured cow, and that took me down some weird internet tubes, but I finally found somepony nearby selling raw milk and he even let me watch him milk the cow so I’d know it was fresh. Cost more than store milk, but it’s going to be worth it in the end.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “How much better than butter can this be?”
“You wait and see.” She swept a hoof over her creation. “This is merely the beginning. Have you ever had butter infused with herbs?”
•••
I hadn’t made fun of her butter obsession—well, obsession was too strong a word. Butter kick?—since I knew how good a cook she was, and even though there seemed no purpose in making something that could be cheaply and easily had store bought, premade, ready to eat, I was willing to wait for results.
I even helped her. Mostly by following instructions exactly and then getting gently corrected when my exact following of instructions wasn’t exact enough.
In my defense, trying to teach me complicated cooking was akin to trying to teach a cat to swim or a dog to climb a tree.
In the end, she turned all the milk into butter. Most of it got stored as-was; she said that she’d do some further processing on them later.
Velvet did make one tube of infused butter, since I really wanted to see that in action. She picked fresh herbs from her window herb garden and mixed them in: parsley, rosemary, and tarragon. Each of those herbs had their own strong smell, which became muted as she mixed it in with the butter.
Before she wrapped it up into a sausage-shape with clingwrap, she told me that she was going to let me have a sample, and told me to cut off a thick piece of bread.
This was something I enjoyed—I’d always thought toast was overrated until she’d convinced me to try some of her homemade bread.
I hadn’t thought that her bread could have been improved by better butter.
I was wrong. All of a sudden, I understood.
This was a game-changer.
Author's Note
Story notes in the comments 
