Definition
Butterine is an imitation butter product prepared from animal fat — typically beef tallow or lard — blended with other ingredients to approximate the taste, texture, and appearance of natural dairy butter. The term is used interchangeably with oleomargarine in legal sources of the late nineteenth century and refers to the same class of manufactured food product. Anderson's Dictionary of Law directs readers directly to the OLEOMARGARINE entry, treating butterine as a synonym rather than a distinct legal category.
The legal significance of butterine arose almost entirely from regulatory and commercial fraud concerns: whether the product could be sold as butter, how it must be labeled, and whether its manufacture and sale could be taxed or restricted under state and federal police powers.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An imitation butter prepared from animal fat with other ingredients.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A substance prepared from animal fat with some other ingredients intermixed, as an imitation of butter. Noted as a commercial product shipped in large quantities to Europe to be finished and sold under the butterine or suine name.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is less about definition than about consequence. Ordinary usage treats butterine as a simple product descriptor. In law, the term triggered a dense regulatory apparatus — taxation, labeling mandates, criminal penalties for fraudulent sale as dairy butter — making the classification of a product as butterine or oleomargarine versus genuine butter a question with serious commercial and criminal stakes.
Common Confusion
Butterine and oleomargarine were used interchangeably in both trade and legal sources through the late nineteenth century, but the terms were not always identical in scope. Oleomargarine, as defined under federal legislation (most notably the Oleomargarine Act of 1886), was the controlling statutory term in U.S. law. Butterine was more common in trade usage and in European regulatory contexts. Researchers encountering butterine in American legal documents should treat it as functionally equivalent to oleomargarine for doctrinal purposes but should verify whether a particular statute or ordinance adopted one term to the exclusion of the other. Some state statutes used butterine specifically; others used oleomargarine exclusively; a few used both.
Why It Matters in Research
Butterine appears in late nineteenth-century American legal materials primarily as a commercial law and food regulation term. Researchers should be aware of several navigational issues:
The Anderson entry is a bare cross-reference to oleomargarine. Substantive legal doctrine — including the constitutional battles over state versus federal regulatory authority, the taxation framework, and the labeling requirements — lives under that heading, not this one. Any research beginning at butterine must immediately pivot to oleomargarine to find the legal substance.
The term's frequency in sources drops sharply after 1900. Federal legislation consolidated around oleomargarine as the operative term, and butterine receded from American legal usage. In historical corpus searches, butterine will surface in roughly the 1870–1905 window; searches for the same legal concepts outside that window require different vocabulary.
The cases cited by Anderson under the butterine/oleomargarine cross-reference are not oleomargarine cases at all — they concern unrelated matters of railroad and banking law. This appears to be a pagination artifact of Anderson's compilation method. Researchers should not assume those citations support oleomargarine doctrine.
European legal materials, particularly British and Dutch trade law from the same period, use butterine as a primary regulatory term where American law used oleomargarine. If the Law Mind corpus includes comparative or international commercial sources, the terminological difference matters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law (1889) treats butterine as a pure synonym for oleomargarine, offering no independent definition. This is consistent with the commercial reality of the period: the two terms described the same product class and were subject to the same regulatory contests.
Webster's 1913 adds useful texture, noting the international trade dimension — manufacturers shipping oleomargarine to Europe for finishing and resale as butterine — which explains why the term had more traction in European regulatory contexts. The Johnson's Cyclopedia citation in Webster's reflects the term's appearance in general commercial reference works of the era, confirming it was understood by a literate public as a trade product, not an obscure legal fiction.
No historical law dictionary reviewed provides substantive doctrinal content under butterine independent of the oleomargarine entry. The term functions in legal dictionaries of the period as a navigational pointer, not a freestanding concept.
Jurisdictional Note
Some states, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, enacted separate butterine statutes in the 1880s and 1890s that used the term butterine rather than oleomargarine. Whether those statutes were coextensive with or narrower than parallel federal oleomargarine regulations was occasionally litigated. Researchers working in state-specific materials should check the precise statutory term used.