Home › The Principles of Cookery › Butter, Burnt Sauce
Butter, Burnt Sauce
Brown two ounces of butter in a frying-pan; stir until it is of a good colour, then add a teaspoonful of salt, a very little cayenne pepper, and two table-spoonfuls of hot vinegar. This sauce is recommended by Dr. Kitchener as excellent to serve over poached eggs or for broiled fish. Probable cost, 4d.
A one-pan brown butter sauce of the kind French kitchens call beurre noir, finished with vinegar. It takes about five minutes and is unforgiving only in the last thirty seconds of them.
- The hinge: stop the butter in timePull the pan from the heat the moment the milk solids are a deep hazelnut brown and the smell turns nutty. Butter carries on darkening off the heat, and once the solids go black the sauce is acrid rather than rich.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter is 57 g, about 4 tablespoons. Two tablespoons of vinegar is 30 ml. The whole batch dresses two to four poached eggs or two fish fillets.
- The salt is heavy-handedA full teaspoon of salt to 2 oz of butter reads as very salty to modern palates, particularly if the butter is salted to begin with. Start with a quarter-teaspoon of fine salt and taste.
- Heat the vinegar, and stand backAdding cold liquid to hot butter makes it seize and spit. Warming the vinegar first, as directed, moderates that; add it away from the flame and swirl rather than stir hard.
- Which vinegarDr. Kitchiner's kitchen would have used malt or cider vinegar. Either works; white wine vinegar gives a cleaner result with fish. Avoid balsamic, which is too sweet for the balance here.
- Pan choiceA pale stainless or lined pan lets you judge the colour. In black cast iron or nonstick you are working blind, and brown butter is judged almost entirely by eye and nose.
- Serve at onceThe sauce separates and dulls as it cools, and the browned solids settle. Pour it over the eggs or fish straight from the pan, scraping the sediment out with it.
- "Probable cost, 4d."The Victorian price note is a costing aid for household accounts, not an ingredient instruction; ignore it.
The Dr. Kitchener cited here is William Kitchiner (c. 1775-1827), the London optician and amateur cook who was known as 'Doctor' though he appears never to have practised medicine, and whose The Cook's Oracle is often credited as among the first English cookbooks to give exact weights and measures. The sauce itself is the English rendering of the French beurre noir, butter cooked until the milk solids brown and then sharpened with vinegar, long the standard dressing for skate in France and, in British kitchens of the period, served with plainly cooked fish or eggs. Its persistence in a late-Victorian dictionary of cookery says something about how such books were built: recipes were quoted, credited and recirculated from earlier authorities for decades, so that a reader in the 1890s was often cooking from advice first printed in the 1810s.