Wrong About Butter Pats

Apparently I've been wrong in my understanding of how butter pats were used.  I'm talking about the little plates and not the globs of butter.  I always thought they were a throwback to Victorian times and used for fancy, formal meals.  But I was wrong.  Let me start at the beginning.

As antique dealers, we often get invited to peoples houses to buy things and this was one of those times.  The seller was downsizing and had a few things from the family farm that she no longer wanted.  The things she wanted to sell were laid out on the kitchen table. While we were deciding what we wanted to buy I was looking around and spotted a stack of flow blue butter pats.  I asked about them and she said they had belonged to her grandmother who used them on the farm and she didn't want to sell them yet.

So I had to ask - "Your grandmother had pretty fancy meals?"

"Oh no" she responded, "just your basic farm meals."

"And she used these butter pats?"

"Yes, there were a lot of boys in the family."  She went on to explain that her grandmother used the butter pats to save on the butter.  The boys usually licked their knives "clean" before taking butter and Grandmother didn't want to keep butter that had been contaminated this way.  So by giving the boys their own butter, the rest of the butter was saved.