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Butter, Brown
Melt six ounces of butter in a stewpan over the fire until it becomes of a brown colour, and then allow it to become cold. Take another stewpan, and put into it a cupful of vinegar with pepper, which reduce one-third by boiling. When the butter is cold, add it to the vinegar and pepper, stir all up well, and warm it over the fire, care being taken that it is not allowed to boil. If the butter is not cool before adding it to the vinegar it will spurt over the sides of the vessel. As the usual taste of the butter is entirely destroyed by the heat to which it is subjected, it will be found that an article of the cheapest kind will answer for this purpose as well as the best.
This is the classic beurre noir of nineteenth-century kitchens: butter cooked dark, then let down with a reduced vinegar. The hinge is temperature — cool the butter before it meets the vinegar, and keep the finished sauce below a simmer.
- Quantities in modern termsSix ounces of butter is 170 g, or one and a half US sticks. A cupful is not a standard measure in a book of this date; it is often taken as something like half an imperial pint, 8-10 fl oz. Reduced by a third, that leaves roughly two-thirds of a cup of sharp liquid for the butter.
- How brown is brownThe butter should go past the nut-brown stage to a genuine dark amber, with the milk solids toasted at the bottom. It moves from browned to burnt in well under a minute, so pull it off the heat while it is a shade lighter than you want and let carryover finish it.
- Why the butter must be coldThe recipe is right, and the reason is water. Hot fat hitting vinegar flashes the water content to steam and throws the contents of the pan out. Cooled to barely warm and stirred in gradually, it combines quietly.
- Never let it boilThis is a loose emulsion of browned butter in acid. Boiling breaks it and the fat separates out as a greasy layer. Warm it only to the point where it is hot to the finger, whisking as it goes.
- Pepper and vinegarUse coarsely cracked black pepper, added to the vinegar at the start so the reduction draws out its heat. Any sharp wine vinegar works; malt vinegar gives the harsher, more period result. Modern versions often add capers and a little chopped parsley at the end.
- The cheap-butter claimThere is truth in it — browning does obliterate the delicate flavour of good butter. But cheaper butter of the period was often salted, and salt will concentrate in the butter as it browns and its water cooks off. Use unsalted and season at the end.
- Strain or don'tThe toasted milk solids carry most of the flavour, so they are often left in. If you want a clean sauce, pour the browned butter off the sediment before cooling.
- Yield and useEnough for about four servings. It is the traditional dressing for skate, and works equally on poached eggs, boiled cauliflower, or brains and other offal. Serve at once; it will not hold or reheat well.
Brown butter sauce is straightforwardly French in origin — beurre noir, black butter, and its lighter sibling beurre noisette, hazelnut butter, named for the colour rather than any nut in it. It belongs to the small stock of foundation preparations a Victorian cook was expected to have at command and apply to whatever came to hand: fish, eggs, vegetables, offal. Its most enduring partnership, raie au beurre noir, is often associated with French bourgeois cooking, though black butter appears in French kitchens a good deal earlier and the pairing is hard to date with any confidence; the sharp vinegar was understood to cut the faint ammoniacal note of skate. French practice later moved away from taking the butter truly black, on the grounds that scorched milk solids are bitter, and modern kitchens usually stop at the nut-brown stage — but the older, darker version is what this book describes, and the frank advice to use the cheapest butter available says a good deal about how far the flavour was expected to travel.