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Maître D'Hôtel Butter
PROCESS: Cream four tablespoons butter with a wooden spoon; add one-half teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper and a few grains cayenne, in the order given; also one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley, and three-fourths tablespoon lemon juice, drop by drop, beating constantly. This is used as a dressing for certain kinds of fish.
A compound butter, and the technique is entirely in the order of operations: seasonings first into soft butter, acid last and slowly. Nothing here has changed except the equipment.
- Butter temperatureFour tablespoons is half a stick. It needs to be genuinely soft — an hour at room temperature — or it will not take the lemon juice. Do not melt it; melted butter will not re-emulsify and you will get a greasy pool with juice beneath.
- The hinge: lemon drop by dropThree-quarters of a tablespoon of juice into half a stick of butter is a lot of water for fat to hold. Added all at once it breaks and weeps. Beat in a few drops at a time, letting each disappear before the next, exactly as the original says.
- Wooden spoon or notA wooden spoon against the side of a bowl works and gives the best texture control. A stand mixer with the paddle on low is faster; a food processor tends to warm the butter and chop the parsley to green paste.
- Salt levelHalf a teaspoon in four tablespoons suits unsalted butter. With salted butter, cut it to a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- "A few grains cayenne"Roughly a pinch — enough for warmth behind the lemon, not heat you can name. Cayenne varies widely in potency, so err low.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf is often said to have more flavour; curly holds its shape better in the butter. Either way dry it thoroughly after washing or the water will help break the emulsion.
- Yield and servingAbout a third of a cup, enough for four to six portions of fish. Roll it in parchment into a log, chill until firm, and cut coins to set on grilled or broiled fish so they melt at the table. It also keeps two weeks refrigerated and several months frozen.
Maître d'hôtel butter is one of the small foundations of French professional cooking, generally traced to the nineteenth century and named for the head of the dining room rather than for any cook — the sort of quick finishing sauce that could be kept ready and applied to whatever came off the grill. By the time this book was printed it had passed thoroughly into American domestic teaching, where compound butters were a way of giving plain broiled fish a restaurant finish without a stock, a roux or a double boiler. The butter is a keeping item, made ahead and cut as needed, which is precisely the kind of economy such instruction was written to encourage.