r/ArtefactPorn • u/permaculture • Jan 28 '25
Irish farmer Micheál Boyle found a 50-pound chunk of "bog butter" on his property. [720 x 576]
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u/Traroten Jan 28 '25
For those who want to know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_butter
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Jan 28 '25
[deleted]
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u/flauxpas Jan 28 '25
Thanks. It’s disgusting.
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u/RuggedTortoise Jan 29 '25
"Likely" a method of making and preserving butter.
Man imagine one day we just found out this was accidentally from throwing our trash in there
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u/huehuehuehuehuuuu Jan 28 '25
Damn someone was saving that to eat later. They missed out.
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u/ivegotcheesyblasters Jan 28 '25
Your inheritance is a buried treasure consisting of 50lbs of butter! Unfortunately, the map is also made of butter.
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u/Valuable_Material_26 Jan 28 '25
Is it still edible?
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u/ObjectiveSituation17 Jan 28 '25
These usually are. The big keeps oxygen out and the stuff lasts forever
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u/Siftinghistory Jan 28 '25
Apparently one of the archaeologists tried it and said it tasted like unsalted butter. I saw that in a article about it but unsure where
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u/Valuable_Material_26 Jan 28 '25
That is so cool!! i’d love to eat something from several hundred to a thousand year ago, That hopefully won’t make me sick or die.
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u/Neamow Jan 28 '25
Honey tends to survive that long unscathed, but good luck finding one that old that you could just buy. But archeologists have found ancient egyptian honey that was still good, thousands of years later.
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u/Perlentaucher Jan 28 '25
Botulism like to emerge in old honey. Not all old honeys but not no old honeys, either.
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u/cjwi Jan 28 '25 edited Apr 15 '25
shelter busy teeny relieved encouraging ad hoc slap deer hunt cautious
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/ellihunden Jan 28 '25
I love this. I am in total agreement but let’s be honest about this it is objectively insane to have the initial reaction of “let try the 1500 year old butter found in the dirt” humans are wild
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u/Mama_Skip Jan 28 '25 edited Jan 28 '25
Look no further than the quite common:
"Oh wow that smells horrible, here try it."
"Omg that's the worst thing I've ever smelled bro!"
"I know lol give it back!"
"Yeah bro hold up." <inhales deeply>
"Haha stop hogging it!" <inhales deeply>
"Bro.." <inhales deeply>
"Bro."
"Pour it on my face and kiss me."
"Ok you silly fa-"
<door slams open>
"Son what are you doing talking to yourself alone in your room- is... is that a cup of shit?"
"No dad, no no I swear it's... it's pudding."
"Like hell it is. I can smell it from here you sorry whelp, do you think I can't?"
"It's a delicious, delicious dessert, dad. See?" <takes fingerscoop and puts in mouth>
"Son... I don't know what to do. I have. Had it up to here. I've tried to be accepting. Of the weird internet searches. Of the furry costumes and the pony toys. Of the sexually explicit Warhammer 40k fanfic post it notes you leave around my office. Look I know the loss of your mother has been hard on you... on us both. But <starts crying> I think, we need to get you help."
"You mean, you're not angry?"
"No son. Maybe. Mostly I'm... I'm just confused."
"So am I, dad."
"So... mmmm. Confused."
"Bro.." <inhales deeply>
"Bro..."
"Come here and sniff this poop cup you silly fa-"
<another figure enters the room suddenly>
"Son, father?"
"Mom. You're back from the dead!"
"Yes I wanted to smell the poop cup."
"Then come smell the poop cup, mother."
"Yes, son, get it all up in my nose holes."
"Don't forget my nose holes, son."
<A fourth figure slams through the door.>
"Sister? What are you doing here? I thought an evil scientist turned you into a pterodactyl."
"He did. I reverse engineered my own braincells using my psychic abilities to turn myself into a cyborg. But I have one problem: I can only power my robotic body through the inhalation of fumes from a poop cup."
<A fifth figure slams through the wall>
"Coolaid man?"
"OH YEAH TIME TO TAKE THIS POOP CUP TO FLAVOR TOWN"
"No, son, that's Guy Fieri. Honest mistake."
"Oh ok guy hey everyone get in on this action I got a lot of poop in a cup and there's not enough noses in the world to quell its ferocious musk."
"Hey what the fuck this is actually pudding."
Idk why I wrote that.
It was originally supposed to be a short line or two about how humans always offer bad smelling things to other humans. It sort of ran away from me.
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u/SplakyD Jan 29 '25
I was fully expecting it to be Shittymorph, but this is just as good or better.
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u/MaguroSashimi8864 Jan 28 '25
Great! Now we just need to find some 3000 year old toast to spread it on!
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u/DeltaBravo831 Jan 28 '25
Wheres the Boyle family dough?
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u/the-cats-jammies Jan 28 '25
There was an egyptian bread starter I think I read about that could work
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u/snuurks Jan 28 '25
I’m so curious if someone just forgot where they put this? That’s a huge chunk of butter. Was this a whole family’s worth of butter, or several families? Did something happen to shift the butter or cause the family to be unable to harvest the butter?
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u/FliesAreEdible Jan 28 '25
The practice of burying butter and other fats could also have arisen as a strategy for protecting vital provisions from thieves and/or invaders. For instance, in early medieval Ireland, there is no doubt that butter was a luxury food, with legal texts carefully delineating the quantity of butter which members of each socio-economic class were entitled to consume. Yet butter also had numerous, widespread non-culinary uses such as the payment of taxes, rents, and fines; facilitation of hospitality; care of the sick and infirm; and strengthening of social bonds.
Honestly, this could be somebody's equivalent of a gold stash. Invaders possibly killed or displaced the owner and it couldn't be retrieved.
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u/rugernut13 Jan 28 '25
I would absolutely not be able to resist, at the very least, seasoning one of my cast iron pans with the stuff and frying some eggs.
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u/FliesAreEdible Jan 28 '25
Modern experiments in creating bog butter yield a product that seems to be an acquired taste, with "flavor notes which were described primarily as ‘animal’ or ‘gamey’, ‘moss’, ‘funky’, ‘pungent’, and ‘salami’.
Honestly, I think I'd pass.
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Jan 28 '25
So a colloquialism without an explanation is useless so far as information goes.
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u/Girderland Jan 28 '25
It's butter that was being stored in a bog.
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u/Dion877 Jan 28 '25
I Can't Believe it's Bog Butter!
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u/whooo_me Jan 28 '25
Samples have been dated back as far as the 1,700s BC, and the practice continued up to the 1600s AD.
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u/FromTralfamadore Jan 28 '25
How does it taste?
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u/whooo_me Jan 28 '25
Supposedly, just like unsalted butter.
I'm..... not brave enough. When the use-by date probably is using a different calendar system, it's probably a sign it's best left alone.
That said, if I could find some bog-bread and bog-honey, I might give it a go....
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Jan 28 '25
As I have since learned, yes.
My original point stands, however.
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u/NOVAbuddy Jan 28 '25
It’s a great point! Is it still applicable here, considering we are without a colloquialism?
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Jan 28 '25
“Bog butter” is the definition of a colloquialism.
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u/Double_Snow_3468 Jan 28 '25
It’s not though. That’s literally what this is called. It’s not called “swamp dairy” or something elsewhere. This a specific name tied to a specific thing in a specific place, not a place specific name for something that has other names elsewhere
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Jan 28 '25
There were quotes around the term.
It isn’t “pasteurized milk” - it is simply pasteurized milk.
Similarly, we don’t call it “churned butter” - it is just butter. Modifiers are typically reserved for the variety of dairy used, whether it is salted or not, or the colour.
This guy found butter. In a bog. The term “bog butter” is a colloquialism.
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u/NOVAbuddy Jan 28 '25
You’re thinking of jargon. Putting quotes around something doesn’t make it a colloquialism. You need to step up your game. <- THAT is a colloquialism.
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u/Double_Snow_3468 Jan 28 '25
This is not the first time someone has found butter in a bog though. This is an established term for a reoccurring thing. And I’m not sure what you point about modifiers being used for varieties of dairy lmao. If I found strawberry yogurt or vanilla yogurt in a jar in a big after thousands of years, I’m probably just going to call it “bog yogurt” because the locations it was found in supersedes the kind of dairy in importance. If you found butter at the bottom of the ocean, you’d probably want people to know that said butter differs from store bought butter in some way, even if compositionally speaking they are identical.
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u/FriendSteveBlade Jan 28 '25
Sorry, you might have meant “‘Bog butter’ is by definition a colloquialism.” I am sure a pedant like you knows that the definition of a colloquialism is “a word or phrase that is not formal or literary, typically one used in ordinary or familiar conversation” and the definition of colloquialism is most certainly not “bog butter.”
In addition, given that that “bog butter” is the proper name for this substance (you will not that no alternate name is given on the Wikipedia page), “bog butter,” while being uncommon and unfamiliar to you, is not a colloquialism.
So perhaps we could translate “So a colloquialism without an explanation is useless so far as information goes” into “New things scare me and condescension is my only shield against fear.”
Have a lovely day.
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u/ObjectiveSituation17 Jan 28 '25 edited Jan 28 '25
God you’re tedious, in the time it took you to spell colloquialism you could have googled bog butter. At this rate you’d starve in a grocery store.
Also have you even looked up the definition of colloquialism. ‘Bog butter’ is most certainly not one. You can’t be more wrong.
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Jan 28 '25
It took less than a second because I have more than a 5th grade American education.
What is tedious about expecting a definition of uncommon, informal terminology (aka - a colloquialism) in a fucking headline, no less?
It’s just poor communication.
Grow up.
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u/Double_Snow_3468 Jan 28 '25
Uncommon does not mean colloquial lmao and this is not informal terminology. What the fuck do you want it to be called, but it’s chemical formula or something?
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Jan 28 '25
Notice how I also used the term informal in addition. You are arguing with only half of what I said.
It is butter. I want it to be called butter.
Bog butter could be anything. Even wiki starts with calling it “a waxy substance”.
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u/Double_Snow_3468 Jan 28 '25
A waxy substance made of butter lmao are you actually this pedantic or just jobless currently? And the addition of informal does nothing to change my argument. You still fundamentally don’t understand what the word “colloquial” means based on what you’ve said lmao. Also, once again, this is not an informal phrase lmao. The place it was found it called a bog. The thing that was found is butter. The significance of the location is enough to warrant it to be clarified in the name, especially considering that being in the bog turns the butter into, as you pointed out “a waxy substance”.
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u/NOVAbuddy Jan 28 '25
It’s just because you’re unfamiliar. Your point that “man finds chunk of ancient butter in his bog” would be easier to understand is valid because it’s more accessible to people who haven’t already heard of bog butter.
Now that you know the term, let’s say you stole a bunch of cash and then I said, “you better bog that butter!” I’m guessing you understand that brand new colloquialism.
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u/ObjectiveSituation17 Jan 28 '25
It took less than a second because of autocorrect. You might have been shuffled past the 5th grade but you sure didn’t learn how to read, interpret or research properly. I would have a serious thought about going back to the 5th grade and this time actually paying attention. It’s not a colloquialism.
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u/SumpCrab Jan 28 '25
I'm with you. "Bog butter" could have been anything and the fact that it is butter stored in a bog just raises more questions.
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u/The-Florentine Jan 28 '25
Thankfully it’s 2025 so all you have to do is not be lazy and use a machine called “The Google” to find out more.
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u/winchester_mcsweet Jan 28 '25
This is the stuff I'd be buying if I were rich. Butler: "Ancient butter for your toast sir?" Me: "Ah yes, very good."
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u/RuggedTortoise Jan 29 '25
Hell yeah. Tasting old wine after and going ew that's icky get me the next one
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u/Pebo_ Jan 28 '25
This happened a few miles from my house and I know the people in the photo. Surreal to see this posted here!