Home › Preserves › Lemon Butter
Lemon Butter
Tea-cup white sugar, three eggs, butter the size of half an egg, beat well together; add juice and grated rind of one large lemon, place in a pan set in a kettle of hot water, stir well until thick. This may be made up in quantity, kept for a long time in bottles or jars, and used as needed for filling tarts, etc.
This is lemon curd, and the cooking method is sound; the keeping instruction is not. The problem is the last sentence, which tells you to put a butter-and-egg preserve into bottles or jars and hold it for a long time.
- Why the storage failsCurd is close to half egg and butter by weight. The lemon juice provides some acidity, but the amount is unmeasured and the finished pH unknown, and the mixture is rich in protein and fat. There is no processing step, no sterilised closure and no measured acidity, so there is nothing here to make it safe to hold at room temperature in a sealed jar.
- The eggs never reach a stated temperature"Stir well until thick" is a visual cue, and the temperature actually reached is unverified and variable. That is tolerable for something eaten the same day and refrigerated; it is not a basis for extended storage.
- Modern practiceCurd is now treated as a short-keeping refrigerated preserve, not a shelf-stable one. If you want to make it, follow a current tested recipe with a stated finishing temperature and refrigerated storage.
- A tea-cupFor reference when reading other recipes in this book: a Buckeye tea-cup is smaller than the breakfast cup and generally reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, though the books are not consistent and the measure is genuinely approximate.
- Butter the size of half an eggA period shorthand for roughly one ounce, about two tablespoons. Whole-egg-sized lumps of butter run to about two ounces.
- A pan set in a kettle of hot waterThis is a double boiler, improvised. "Kettle" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks usually means a large pot rather than a spouted tea kettle.
Lemon curd, sometimes called lemon cheese or lemon butter, belongs to the same nineteenth-century family as fruit cheeses and fruit butters: a thick, spoonable fruit preparation that could fill a tart shell or be spread on bread without further work. The "butter" in such names is usually taken to describe the consistency, as in apple butter, though this version does contain butter. The instruction to lay it by in bottles or jars reflects how the household of 1877 thought about it — as something kept rather than made to order — and that assumption is precisely what modern food safety has overturned.