“More rancid yak butter in that?' 'Please,' said Lu-Tze, holding out his cup. ”
“It's the real stuff you got there, Ronnie,' he said, taking a sip. 'The butter we're getting these days, you wouldn't grease a cart with it.' 'It's the breed,' said Ronnie. 'I go and get this from the highland herds six hundred years ago.' 'Cheers,' said Lu-Tze, raising his cup.”
Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time
"You can get a lot of things in Toronto, yak butter is not one of them."
Tasty Tours food guide Odile Chatelain
This year we're spending my birthday week in Toronto, and for our last day in the city, we did a tasting tour of Kensington Market's eclectic food scene*. At one of our stops, we were presented with Tibetan black tea with salted yak butter, a beverage option that I would have been unaware of were it not for its semi-regular appearance in the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels. As such, I was probably more excited by the opportunity to sample yak butter tea than the rest of the tour.
How did it taste? Well, as our guide gently commented after surveying the room, it's an acquired taste. That being said, I found that if I treated it more as a broth than a tea, it wasn't that bad - although I couldn't tell you whether or not it was real yak butter.
- Sid
* As an example, during our tour we passed Hungarian Thai and Jamaican Italian fusion restaurants. Sadly, we visited neither. Perhaps a future trip will allow us to sample the cross-over cuisine at Rasta Pasta.
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