The butter board for clowns

this one's for all of you

Hi, clowns!

I don’t know how closely you guys keep up with food trends on social media, but one of the more recent ones is known as a “butter board.”

It’s about as simple as it sounds; you spread a bunch of nice butter on a cutting board then sprinkle seasonings on top, like herbs, spices, and fancy salt. You can also create a sweet version, with ingredients such as pumpkin spice, along with various types of sugar or honey. Then you eat shameless gobs of it, usually with bread.

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A post shared by Christine Pittman | Easy Recipes + Tips (@cookthestory)

Like charcuterie boards, butter boards allow food influencers to be very twee, which is key for an influencer’s survival.

Because of this, a food influencer ravenous for attention will typically do things like add edible flowers (which don’t taste good and cost a lot). This nets them a dopamine hit every time someone clicks the “like” button on their content, along with internet clout, which as far as I know cannot be traded for anything of actual value. Or they start a hit Substack newsletter such as this one.

Davida suggested I create a butter board of my own and dedicate it to you all. So she and I sat and thought very hard about a clown’s typical favorite foods. We came up with a list of ingredients that you’d normally find at a clown’s home, which is a circus.

So this one’s for you, clowns.

We bought gumdrops, various sprinkles, Pop Rocks, Red Hots, cotton candy, maraschino cherries, whipped cream in a can, Cracker Jacks, and circus peanuts.

Many people do not enjoy circus peanuts, which are an odd Styrofoam-like candy that are flavored with artificial banana flavoring. I greatly dislike them for a reason other than how they taste, however.

You see, Davida and I went to eight stores in Chicago in order to locate them, and we ended up empty-handed. One of the stores included Walgreen’s, and when we finally asked one of the employees if they had any, he just laughed at us.

I finally located some at CVS the next day but by then, my blood had been completely replaced with a newfound hate for circus peanuts.

As I am a very busy man with multiple newsletters now, I cannot sit around waiting for a stick of butter to come around to room temperature, which takes forever.

So I got a workaround, which is spreadable butter in a tub. It’s mostly butter, but it is cut with an oil that stays liquid even while refrigerated, such as canola. The blend allows it to be spreadable even straight out of the fridge.

Maybe I should do a canola oil board next.

As you can see, I am very artistic, and am great at swirling butter on a plank of wood.

Also, the longer I look at this photo, the more it looks like I smeared butter directly on top of my kitchen island, which in retrospect would have been a wonderful idea. Can you imagine showing up at a party where the host topped an entire kitchen island in butter for internet clout? Now that’s my kind of fiesta.

I started by topping the board with the most childish elements, which were the sprinkles and the little icing stars.

I immediately missed and got a bunch of roly-poly sprinkles on the island and on the floor. Imagine a grown-ass man helplessly watching sprinkles fall off a table and instantly getting mad, because that was how I reacted.

I then dotted the butter board with cinnamon-flavored Red Hots, which I hadn’t had in decades.

At this point I would consider Red Hots old people candy as well as clown food. I cannot think of a sane child who would deliberately reach for a bag of them. Many people do not know this, but in the wild, clowns eat so many Red Hots that they turn their noses red.

I then added the Cracker Jacks and Dots gumdrops on top, trying to make my whimsy look free and not at all forced.

The issue was that it looked forced. Guys, I have to confess something. I’m a poser.

Then I faced my new sworn enemy, circus peanuts.

I ate one and my teeth immediately hurt. I still do not quite understand the edible appeal of circus peanuts, but they are an important part of any clown’s diet, so I must respect them.

I tore up the circus peanuts and also applied little puffs of cotton candy.

By this point, I was having a lot of fun, and was disappointed when I realized that there were only a few key elements left to assemble. But it lifted my spirits when I realized that after this edition of the newsletter is published, I will be trending on Pinterest and I will finally have gotten my big break. See you all in influencer hell, everyone.

One of the finishing touches was maraschino cherries, which I carefully put on top of the clown butter board, using my sick chopstick skills.

I’ve finally gotten something good out of being Korean!!!

After adding small squiggles of whipped cream, I was finally finished with my butter board.

It was my masterpiece. The gang inspected my work and I took their silence as a nod of approval, and they were by no means posed for this photo on top of animal crackers to pander for likes on social media.

I had to try my new concoction.

I took an animal cracker and dragged it through the buttery spread with canola oil. It was not easy to get any of the toppings on it, but I did my best. And of course it was delicious. I mean, it was a shitload of butter with a bunch of candy on top, eaten with a sweet animal cracker, how could it not be? I ended up eating kind of a vulgar amount of it and felt immediately guilty. Who the hell actually eats this much butter in one sitting?

Then later, there was an issue I hadn’t thought about. As I was washing the wood I’d used as the platform for my clown butter board, I realized that even though I’d scraped the remainder off pretty well, it was still slick with butter. I scrubbed the crap out of it, did a reasonably good job of cleaning it, then came to realize I’d completely ruined my sponge. Try as I might, I could not get the sponge to stop being greasy. So I had to throw it away.

Goddamn butter board influencers owe me a sponge now. I guess I should have seen that coming. I also should have known about the diarrhea that was about to show up the next day too.

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Congratulations to me for giving myself diarrhea, all because I was trying to jump on the influencer train. Like Jesus, I sacrificed my body for you.

Don’t forget to share Food is Stupid on social media, because it helps the newsletter grow. (Well, maybe not for much longer, considering what that numbnuts is doing over at Twitter.)

And of course, don’t forget to upgrade to a paid subscription to the newsletter, if you haven’t already. Paid subscribers become immediately 10 times more attractive. Plus, you get full access to the archives at foodisstupid.substack.com, and you’ll get almost double the content in the form of exclusive extra editions.

Later this week, for example, I’ll be making a guacamole board, which on paper sounds cute…until the whole thing turns a putrid shade of brown. Paid subscribers, you’re going to get the most beautiful food photography you’ve ever seen. Get excited. Or sign up.

Okay, time to bask in my newfound fame as a butter board clown influencer. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week.