Margarine is a yellow fat that looks and spreads like butter, but it is not made from cream. It is made from vegetable oils, and in the past from animal fats too. People put it on bread and cook with it. It was invented in the nineteenth century as a cheaper stand-in for butter, and some people still wrinkle their nose at it — they will tell you it is not the real thing. Others use it every day and do not think twice. In Britain, friends and family often just say marge. The name is a bit of a surprise: it comes from French, from a fatty acid called margaric acid, and that was named from an old Greek word for pearl, because the crystals had a pearly shine. The food itself does not look like pearls; the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul just liked the look of those crystals. The ending -ine was helped along by words like glycerine.