Buttergate

Yo yo yo y’all heard of this TV chef named Paula Deen (sic)?  Her brother’s name is Earl, but that’s a bit too frou-frou for their target demographic (well it’s actually more of a Wal-Mart demographic), so he just goes by Bubba.  Well, Bubba Hiers is being accused of an assortment of unsavory acts against his workers.  I don’t really feel like going into detail.  Basically, imagine all the things you would expect someone named “Bubba Hiers” to do and you won’t be too far off.  Anyway, Paula was deposed as part of Bubba’s trial.  Her testimony revealed some pretty lurid details about her personal life, the creepiest of which was that she wanted to throw Bubba a wedding with a Southern plantation theme, replete with middle-aged black men dressed as slaves.  Yeah.  I’ve been to some weird weddings in my day, even one that was crashed by Dikembe Mutombo, but this one is a fridge too far.  

Understandably, Deen got fired from her Food Network shows.  It’s a disheartening blow to her fans.  I count myself among them.  She does some amazing things with butter, or "yellow gold" as some call it.  She truly was the Bard of Butter, the Laureate of Lard.  She displayed an artistic flair for cooking, a beautiful proficiency much like "Pistol" Pete Maravich, if basketballs were made of rendered bacon fat and hoops were made of diabetes.  She is pretty much my culinary hero.  If Mount Rushmore were made of butter, she’d be carved into it along with that hot Native American woman on the Land O’Lakes box.  

Her upcoming cookbook has been dropped by her publisher, which is a shame because it contained some of her most revolutionary recipes yet.  The book itself was rumored to be edible, with dangerously high levels of trans fats and split infinitives (recommended serving size: 2 chapters).  Its title was supposed to be Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up.  I’m not kidding, "lightened up".  Lightened up.  Though I do give her credit for not using the term “whitened up”.  Presumably it was intended to be the sequel to Paula Deen's Old Testament: Am I My Butter’s Keeper?   

Anyway I have high friends in places, and they managed to sneak me a copy of her manuscript.  Of course there are the old standbys like Butter Loaf, Country Fried Butter, Beer Battered Butter, Butters Foster, Butters Rockefeller, and Upside Down Butter Surprise.  But what's really notable is the startling boldness and creativity of some of the book's new recipes.  Take an appetizer she calls "Pretzelcoatl", for example.  That's when you take a big ole tub of butter, strip yourself and smear your entire naked body with it, grab a fistful of pretzels, and then set yourself on fire at the altar of Buttercoatl, the buttered serpent god of the ancient Olmecs (editor's note: this dish is meant to be consumed only on the eve of the harvest moon of non-Leap years, under the watchful eye of a temple-certified menstruating virgin).  Another tasty dish is the "Butterostomy".  That's when you fill a 55 gallon drum with equal parts melted butter and hog squeeze and have the contents delivered to you intravenously over the course of a week (only a week because that’s the longest the insurance company will cover your hospital stay, and even then it’s only insurable because you got your personal gastrobutterologist to claim that you were suffering from dangerously low blood butter levels).  And then there's the piece de resistance, the chef d'oeuvre, the coup de maitre, the fin du fin, the raison d'etre, the City of Light, the mouthwatering masterpiece that Paula calls "Buttered Houdini".  That's when you drain an Olympic sized swimming pool and fill it with butter, fly the Pope in to consecrate it in the name of St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of butter and angina, throw a shackled escape artist in, and then get the surviving members of the offensive line of the 2001 Super Bowl runners-up New York Giants to come and see if they can finish eating the butter before the magician can escape.  

On a more serious note, one thing I find strange in the aftermath of Deen’s firing is the cognitive dissonance being exhibited by the people coming to her defense.  Basically they're saying that every Southerner her age is racist, so why single her out?  But these are also presumably the same people who claim that racism in America is no longer a problem and get over it you libruls and I disagree with the president's policies not his skin color and some of my best friends are Marxist Kenyan Muslims and why can black people use the N-word but if I scream it at the dark-complected kid next door suddenly I'm the racist?!?!?  So anyway, which is it, geniuses?  You can't have it both ways.  Either racism is a pervasive enough problem that we have to take it seriously and try to counteract it, so let's not reflexively accuse people of playing the "race card" every time someone claims to be a victim of racism (and we can forgive Deen but use this as a teachable moment for her and others like her who are just symptoms of a pervasive racist culture) or racism is so rare that any public expression of it should be treated as a shocking violation of societal norms, so we can more or less safely scoff at any purported victim of racism since statistically you're more likely to milk a hermaphroditic unicorn than be a victim of racism (and Deen should be mercilessly lambasted for failing to conform to the same pluralistic norms that most Americans have no problem adhering to).  So, idiots, choose.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  And if it's a chocolate cake, you can't dress it like a slave and expect it to work for beer.

Paula's Home Cooking may be off the air and Food Network may want nothing more to do with her, but her brand is still going strong in the American (clogged) Heartland.  If I'm her agent, I'm pitching potential new shows to every TV station under the sun.  If there's one thing America loves more than racism and butter, it's a comeback story.  You can't tell me there isn't a huge market for such shows as Welcome Back Butter, WKKK in Cincinnati, Deen & Deen: Butterneys at Law, Clarissa Enslaves It All, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Butter, and my personal favorite, Manumission: Impossible.