Margarine was not sold in grocery stores, I think, until the mid 1970’s. It was BUTTER only. My family used to “bootleg” margarine when we visited relatives out of state back to Wisconsin.
Lived there (West Allis, then Appleton) through 8th grade—haven’t visited in 40+ years but want to one of these years.
In California, margarine looked like Crisco. The hosewife had to stir color in with a wooden spoon in a big bowl. After WWII, the big advance was the margarine coming in a plastic bag with a color capsule included. Then you kneaded the bag until the color disbursed throughout (that was my job). Finally, in the late 50s margarine was allowed to be sold in quarters, but it was cut in a different shape from butter. The Dairy industry was very powerful.
During the War, my grandmother and uncle had a dairy farm, so we could get butter during the war because they were producing for the Army and were allowed to keep a certain amount for themselves. Margarine was very difficult to get and used up scarce ration stamps. Butter was impossible to get. We brought back a supply of butter whenever we visited the “ranch”, as we called it in California. Normally my family would have eaten margarine because it was cheaper. I always loved butter when we could get it.
I was a very small child then, and sometimes we’d make our own butter. My other grandmother would skim the cream off the top of the milk and save it.(They hadn’t invented homogenized milk yet.) Then she’d put it in an old mayonnaise jar, and my job was to roll the jar around on the floor until it turned to butter. Then she’d salt it and we’d use it. We lived in the Central Valley of CA where it was very hot in the summer. It didn’t take long to make butter by that method.