Oleomargarine. My, that is a long word. We call it margarine, nowadays. Back before WW ll, we called it oleo. You will find that name in old cook books.

I despised oleomargarine back in the day. It didn't come ready to use. Packaging in quarters was unheard of. It came in a white solid one pound block. You had to set it out on the table to soften before adding coloring to it. That was my job. I hated it. However, like must hated jobs, we usually wind up doing them. Let me tell you about this one. We couldn't afford butter – wonderful butter – with such a nice flavor. Oleo tasted like oleo, with sort of a chemical flavor. The cost was ten or fifteen cents a pound as opposed to many times that for real butter.

In a large shallow bowl, I would cut the offending glob of white into pieces to help it soften faster. Inside the oiled paper wrapper was a small packet of orange stuff. I would tear off one end and shake it over the bowl's contents. Then with a large spoon, I fiercely worked it until it looked like butter. That orange powder turned to yellow in the oleo. Then dumped it into a small crock Mother kept for oleo, I placed it in the refrigerator. I repeated this process with every pound of that awful stuff. I lived for the day when I could afford real butter.

Are you wondering why the oleo didn't come already colored? The all powerful Dairy Lobby was the answer. For years they had their way. It was to protect the dairy farmer, they said. If oleo came already colored, housewives (That's what they called married women back then.) would stop buying real butter. They had their way until after the war when many things changed.

The flavor of margarine changed, too. The chemical taste was gone. Of course, there was no mistaking margarine for real butter, but at least, it came in a more respectable form, colored. One thing that has changed is the water content.

I remember the first time I discovered that not all margarine was the same. Some of the stuff we buy today has a large proportion of water to oil in it. Have you ever melted a stick of margarine in a saucepan and hear water sizzling as it boils away. You can't bake with that. If you intend to bake with margarine, you check the fat content on the package. If it has the same fat content as real butter, you can use it for baking. But it still won't taste like butter.