Whipped Cream vs Fancy Butter

The supermarket sells various kinds of fancy butter, but why don’t people eat whipped cream instead … I’m sure I’m missing something

In addition to what has been already said, another thing you’re missing is that butter isn’t only used by simply eating it; it’s also used in cooking and baking. In the latter case especially, the whey in the cream [LW(p) · GW(p)] will ruin almost any recipe where you attempt a direct substitution of whipped cream for butter.

grin! I love this kind of analysis, thank you for challenging my assumptions!

But I'm confused why you're eating whipped cream rather than plain butter. Given you're only looking at one dimension (cost per calorie), why not go even cheaper?

Just to spoil the answer - it's the same as why you might prefer fancy butter to whipped cream, or to cheap butter: the composition is actually different. Cream still has some whey in it, and whipping it just suspends it, where fully churning or overwhipping it separates it out so the remainder is purer fat.

And fancier butter is basically starting with a richer-fat cream, and processing it such that the butterfat is purer than in cheap butter.

In summary: butter is better than whipped cream (for some things)? no whey!

Having to clean an eggbeater is a dealbreaker for me.

(that said I don't really use fancy butter either)

You can keep butter in your fridge for weeks and it will stay fresh enough to use. (If you're fussy you can scrape off a thin layer of slightly-oxidized butter from the surface.) You can't do that with cream. That doesn't matter so much if you have shops where you can conveniently buy fresh cream every week, which is pretty common these days but maybe used not to be.

As others have said, cream contains a lot more water than butter does. If you spread whipped cream on your toast, I'm pretty sure you'll get soggy toast.

Butter keeps approximately its consistency for much longer than whipped cream does. If you make sandwiches with whipped cream and take them to work or school for lunch, I'm pretty sure you'll end up with not-at-all-whipped cream making your sandwiches soggy.

If you're specifically buying fancy butter, you may want the flavour of fancy butter. This is not the same as the flavour of whipped cream. (Just how different depends on exactly what sort of fancy butter.)

It's not so easy (I think) to whip up cream in very small quantities. That "serving" looks to me like a distinctly larger amount of cream-or-butter than I'd want in contexts where I'm using butter but not cooking with it.

Generally, I'm not very sure why you would use whipped cream instead of butter. I mean, OK, it's a bit cheaper (if you ignore wastage and effort and so forth), but so are many other things: water, flour, sawdust. And while clearly whipped cream is more like butter than water, flour and sawdust are, I don't see that it's so much like butter as to serve the same purposes. It doesn't have the same taste, the same consistency, the same balance of nutrients, the same anything.

I love this take. You're out here living in 3020. Also, I never get to use my eggbeater these days, so I'm excited to try this.

Alternatively, maybe people think whipped cream has to have sugar in it? This one is simple: whipped cream should not have sugar in it. If you’re eating whipped cream on something sweet it doesn’t need sugar because the other thing is sweet, while if you’re having it on something savory it doesn’t need sugar because that would taste funny.

This is false. You forgot about an entire basic flavor: sour.

Obvious counterexample to your claim: whipped cream on berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc.). Do the berries taste sweet? No, not really (even the sweeter cultivars / crops don’t contain enough sugar to be “dessert”-level sweet). Are the berries “savory”? No. Does sweet whipped cream “taste funny” on berries? No, it tastes exactly perfect.

(Other examples in the same vein: Key lime pie; blueberry/peach cobbler—recall that it’s usually served with either sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream—which is certainly sweet.)