Kings, soldiers, nomads and angels. All are said to have tasted the benefit of butter through the ages.

It is believed to have become truly popular thanks to a tribe of horsemen known as the Scythians. According to ancient histories, they considered butter so important that they put blind slaves in charge of its production because they wouldn’t be distracted while churning the cream needed to make it.

But historians believe that by the time the Scythians were riding the plains of Central Asia several centuries before Christ, butter had already been around for thousands of years.

Sarah, the wife of the biblical prophet Abraham, served butter and cakes when they were visited by three angels to be told they would have a son, Isaac.

Butter was used to add flavour to the bread eaten by the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. Hippocrates, the physician known as ‘the father of medicine’, used it to treat burns.

Meanwhile, Ancient Romans who weren’t applying it to wounds on the battlefield and in the Colosseum were having it smeared over their skin and hair in The Eternal City’s beauty parlours.

It was wrapped in vine leaves in Normandy during the Middle Ages and mixed with herbs as well as being stored in Irish peat bogs in the days before the invention of the refrigerator. And it became fashionable once again with royalty but this time as a spread. The pampered greyhounds of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I were even fed a breakfast of buttered toast.

Butter went on the list of rationed products only four months after the start of World War II. In Britain, every person was allowed 4ozs. (113.4 grams) of butter. In the US, some families loved the taste of butter so much that they couldn’t bear to be without it and kept a cow to make their own.

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