Only In Iowa

If you’ve ever made graham crackers from scratch (which are miles better than the store-bought ones), there’s a step in the recipe where you have to get your hands dirty. Take a stick of butter, cut it into very small pieces, dump the pieces into the mixture of dry ingredients, and dive on in with your fingers until the dough starts to clump together. It may be the only time butter and my hands ever come in contact with each other. Which is also to say, I won’t be sculpting a butter cow any time soon.

Sculptor, cow

Creating art out of food seems like an inevitable destination. I mean, back in Michelangelo’s day everyone was taking a block of marble and seeing what they could do with it. Then all but one of them quickly realized there was only one Michelangelo. The others probably turned to an easier material to work with like wood or clay. 1,000 years on, we’re sculpting food. Chocolate is a popular medium. Cakes are shaped into just about everything imaginable. But a cow made out of butter – what’s that all about?

A more fitting Hawkeye State image

We turn to Iowa to learn more about this oddity.  Most people prefer to fly over Iowa but since you’re reading and not flying, let me enlighten you.  On the list of 10 Things to Know About Iowa, there is no butter and there is no cow. There are a lot of pigs (the most of any state) and millions of acres of corn (also “the most”), and Iowa’s “Hawkeye” nickname is a reference to the birth of the red delicious apple (who knew?).  But none of this gets us to butter and cows.

The “10 Things…” list does mention the Iowa State Fair, and it is here that we find real cows by the hundreds… and a life-sized one made out of butter.  The Fair, whose 2025 edition wrapped up three weeks ago, has been making “buttered cows” since 1911, thanks to five Iowans who’ve passed the butter baton down over the years.  The latest, Sarah Pratt, has been making the cows for the last nineteen years, and only after apprenticing with the last sculptor fifteen years before that.  Some people blog; others make cows out of butter.

The 1911 original

Like papier-mâché, a butter cow is created on top of a frame built from wood, wire, and/or metal.  Then we heap on some fun statistics.  600 lbs. of “low moisture, pure cream, Iowa butter” is applied to create a cow that’s five-and-a-half feet tall and eight feet long.  The sculptor’s “studio” is a walk-in cooler set to 40ºF.  After the cow is displayed at the fair, all that butter is recycled for use on the next ten years of cows.  Unless you’d rather use it for toast, which would butter 19,200 slices.

Michelangelo didn’t stop sculpting after his famous David, of course, and neither does Sarah Pratt with her butter cows.  Also following tradition, she creates a “companion sculpture” to keep the cow company.  Sometimes the companion is an homage to Iowa, such as a John Deere tractor.  Most years the companion is a random anniversary, like the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon (totally random because Neil wasn’t born in Iowa).  This year the sculpture featured the characters from “Toy Story”, denoting the movie’s 30th anniversary.  You get the feeling Sarah enjoys sculpting butter so much that a life-sized cow just isn’t enough.

Woody, Buzz

For all of my research, I can’t figure out why a cow made out of butter and Iowa belong in the same sentence.  Nearby Wisconsin and Michigan are better known for dairy cows.  California tops the list of the five states producing the most butter (and Iowa isn’t one of the other four).  No matter, this tradition isn’t stopping anytime soon.  The butter cow even has a place in the Smithsonian Institution (thankfully, as a replica that will never melt).

I love butter, but more on top of baked goods and in graham cracker recipes than in the shape of a cow.  I will admit to buying my butter by the brick instead of by the stick.  But now that I know about Iowa’s annual creations, I’ll never look at my morning toast again without thinking, mooooooooo.

Some content sourced from the Iowa State Fair website, the U.S. News article, “10 Things to Know About Iowa”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

27 thoughts on “Only In Iowa”

  2. Tom recently turned me on to a great podcast called “The Memory Palace”, and while we were on vacation I saw that there was now a book of some of the stories from the show. One of them was about Caroline Shawk Brooks, who was a fine artist with butter – who in 1877 was the talk of the town in Iowa for her work. I’m not finding a link to the “Memory Palace” episode – but this is a great look at where it all may have started:
    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/caroline-shawk-brooks-butter-sculptor-history

    Ric

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  3. I always loved the State Fair when I was little, but I was a 4-H kid, so the fair was a culmination of a lot of hard work. Kansas had its quirky traditions too – crazy guys walking around on stilts and giant pumpkin contests, to name a few.

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    1. I sense the state fairs in the Midwest take things to a whole different level. We went to Colorado’s just once and I have nothing to report (like a butter cow) that would be considered “memorable”.

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    1. Reminds me of Georgia’s use of the nickname “The Peach State”. South Carolina produces more peaches than Georgia, and ranks behind only California. Third-place pride?

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  6. That was interesting reading the stats on the butter cow Dave. We have a butter cow at the Michigan State Fair every year, though it has been years since I’ve been to the Fair to see it in person, but on social media they always have pictures of it. I always wondered what they did with the butter after the Fair was over and if they could recycle it or did they gave out slices of warm homemade bread slathered in butter? I guess not due to sanitary reasons. I have never tried the Kerrygold butter, just the boring Benecol for me, but I’ll bet it tastes good on toast.

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    1. I’ve now learned that Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan all have butter cows. Seriously? You’d think Wisconsin would be known for theirs (if they have one) before other states. Maybe they have a cow made out of cheese? Kerrygold is a wonderful product but it’s super expensive. We’ve recently shifted to another brand you can get at Costco for a whole lot less.

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      1. Having a cow made out of cheese for Wisconsin would be fun – they should do that, but all cheese, not just a wedge/cheesehead. 🙂 I see Kerrygold at the grocery store, but never tried it. I used to use sweet butter, but I’d forget to take it out of the fridge, then have to wait for it to get soft enough to spread it.

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    1. Agreed, we both unexpectedly came across cows this week. Yours was real (as was the encounter). Mine was a dairy product and nothing more than a featured story on my newsfeed. You win 🙂

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  8. Okay, I can’t be the only one who is slightly disappointed that the full cow (or whatever) isn’t pure butter but some other material as a frame. I wanted giant butter, baby!

    Thanks for the graham cracker recipe at the end. I was intrigued by your first paragraph. Now I need to take a look at this recipe… and see if my daughter will make it. 😉

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    1. Same sense of disappointment, Ilsa. It reminds me of the solid-looking chocolate bunny you’d get in your Easter basket, that broke into pieces in your mouth when you realized it was hollow. I pass on the graham cracker recipe with no caveats. They simply don’t get any better (and making the signature holes with a fork is kinda fun).

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  9. Instead of Neil Armstrong, she should have done James T. Kirk, the fictional Star Trek captain who was proud to have been born in Iowa. Add me to the list of people who were disappointed to learn that the cow isn’t solid butter – but a moment’s thought made me realize that a solid life-sized butter cow wouldn’t have enough structure to support itself. Ah, well…

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    1. Only a Trekkie (which does not describe me) would know Captain Kirk was from Iowa! You’ll be happy to know the 2016 companion butter sculpture celebrated the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.

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  10. Very interesting. I understand her sculpturing studio is a cooler set at 40, but once it’s on display how do they keep it cool enough so it doesn’t melt off the frame? Here even fall fairs seem to be on warm days anymore, not like when I was a kid and the weather would be so cold you’d sometimes have to wear your winter coat! I often wonder about ice sculpture competitions too, why do they do it, so many winter festivals have them and they are so elaborate – who’d want to stand outside in sub-below temps for hours chipping at a block of ice. PS. Now that I’m thinking about butter, I really miss those chilled butter foil packed squares you used to get in fancy restaurants – no one has them anymore.

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    1. It’s always been my complaint about butter “pats”, Joni. Okay so one pat accommodates one piece of bread, but what if you want another piece? You have to ask for more butter. I get it – restaurants are trying to be frugal (and regulations probably require them to throw away the unused pats) but surely there’s a better approach where both the customer and the restaurant are satisfied. Maybe the answer is to simply stop serving the bread, sigh…

      Great question about how the cows are displayed without melting. Now I need to actually go to the Iowa State Fair to find out!

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      1. I think that might be a long road trip! My favourite steakhouse used to serve a small bowl of foil-wrapped squares, properly chilled, and there was enough in them. But then they switched to those little plastic containers at room temperature, that hardly have a dab in them. But now that you mention it, in a lot of restaurants you do have to ask now…..or horrors they serve margarine.

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