What does the expression “You can't spoil porridge with butter” mean?
That there should be a lot of good things! Following this logic, we can confidently say: “Кашу маслом не испортишь” (“Kashu maslom ne isportish”) or “You can't spoil porridge with butter”.
In the old days, porridge was one of the main, everyday dishes. It was not for nothing that they said about it: “Porridge is our mother and bread is our breadwinner”. And, at the end of the 19th century, the expression “you can't spoil porridge with butter” began to appear in explanatory dictionaries.
It was believed that the butter added to the cereals made the porridge only tastier. It made any buckwheat or millet even heartier and healthier.
This expression was also used in a figurative sense: something useful cannot spoil anything, even if there is too much of it. By the way, when funds were limited and there was no way to fix it, culinary comparisons were also used: “Our woe is that there is porridge without butter.”
An English equivalent would be: “There’s never too much of a good thing.”
