Home › Some Useful Recipes › Melted Butter
Melted Butter
It is made in the relative proportions of two ounces of butter, two tablespoonfuls of water, and a little flour dredged in, prepared over a hot fire, and shaken back and forth. Another good way of making is to rub two tablespoonfuls of flour into a quarter of a pound of butter, adding five teaspoonfuls of water; set the sauce-pan containing it in a vessel of water kept boiling until it simmers.
This is the old English "melted butter" — a thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Two methods are given: direct heat, and a water bath for the nervous.
- The name is misleadingIn nineteenth-century English cookery "melted butter" means a flour-thickened butter sauce, the ancestor of drawn butter sauce. It is not clarified butter, and it is not the French beurre fondu.
- Weights and measuresTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; a quarter pound is 8 tablespoons, or one stick. The "little flour dredged in" is unspecified — start with a scant teaspoon for the smaller quantity and judge by thickness.
- The water looks wrong but is notFive teaspoonfuls of water to a quarter pound of butter gives a very thick, barely pourable sauce. Some period recipes thin it with more liquid, or with the water the fish or vegetables were boiled in; add liquid a spoonful at a time to the consistency you want.
- The hinge: never let it boilThis is a butter emulsion held together by a little starch. Hard boiling will break it and leave you with oily butter and a scum of flour. Keep it just at a simmer and keep it moving.
- Why the second methodSetting the saucepan in boiling water is a bain-marie, and it is the safer route — the sauce cannot exceed 212F and so cannot catch or split. Use it if you are making the sauce ahead or holding it.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt is essential, and a few drops of lemon juice or a spoonful of chopped parsley or capers turns it into the standard accompaniment for boiled fish.
- Yield and servingThe larger quantity makes something like three-quarters of a cup of thick sauce, enough for about four servings of boiled fish, asparagus, cauliflower or a steamed pudding. It does not reheat well; make it close to the time it is wanted.
Melted butter was a workhorse sauce of English cooking for well over two centuries, poured over boiled fish, boiled vegetables and steamed puddings alike, and mocked by French-trained cooks for exactly that ubiquity. Its persistence into a 1900 American household manual under "Some Useful Recipes" shows how much of the everyday repertoire was still inherited English practice rather than the newer French-influenced cookery being taught in the cooking schools of the same decade. The two methods given here reflect a real division in the period kitchen: the shaken pan over a hot fire is fast and depends on the cook's judgment, while the pan set in boiling water is the cautious version, the same water-bath logic as the double boiler. Add parsley, capers, chopped egg or an anchovy and you have most of the standard English fish sauces of the era, all built on this one base.