In the 1960s, margarine was sold as a white product, looking much like shortening. The package also contained a packet of colouring to be blended ourselves.
Butter was not a particularly affordable luxury when I was a little girl, about age 6 or 7 in the mid-1960s. It still is classed as an extravagance to use for baking delicious chocolate chip cookies in my home. Mainly, we purchase margarine as the “butter” to add flavour to warm toast, fresh buns, a heap of mashed potatoes or anything that needs it. With the new blends, it is very near to the taste of real butter and still costs less.
Though margarine was legalized in 1948 after its banning in 1886, there was still a provincial ban on colouring the food product in Ontario in the 1960s. I remember my mother bringing out a large bowl and filling it with the white margarine. She opened a packet of colouring – I think it was a liquid, but I’m a bit fuzzy on that – and then with a wooden spoon, pressing and mixing the reddish-orange colouring into the margarine. It wasn’t an easy task. The spread was stiff and since it was a vegetable oil, it was difficult to get it to accept the colour. Poking at it myself, I gave up in short order.
The competitive dairy farmers of the time would have been very happy. There was no fear of confusing butter with the spread. At the end of all that mixing, the margarine was definitely not a light butter colour at all; it was more of a bright, sunshine-yellow shade.
