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BUTTER CLARIFIED (another way)
Dissolve the butter before the fire, and have ready a clean jar in which to pour it. There is much waste in straining clarified butter, and this is not necessary if it be stirred once or twice whilst melting, then allowed to stand and carefully poured into the jar, so as to leave the sediment behind. Tie it down securely to keep it from the air.
A method rather than a formula: melt, settle, decant. The whole point is separating pure butterfat from the water and milk solids that make butter spoil.
- "Before the fire" means gentle, indirect heatUse the lowest burner setting, a heavy pan, or a 200F oven. The butter should melt and separate without ever bubbling hard; brisk boiling drives the solids back into suspension and browns them.
- The hinge: pour, do not tipLet the melted butter stand off the heat for several minutes so the milk solids sink and any foam rises. Skim any foam, then pour the clear gold layer off in one steady motion and stop the instant the cloudy layer reaches the lip. Cassell's objection is to straining as such -- the recipe says there is "much waste" in it -- and holds that careful pouring makes it unnecessary.
- Salted or unsaltedNineteenth-century butter was usually salted, sometimes heavily, and salt concentrates in the water layer you are leaving behind. Unsalted butter gives a cleaner result and lets you judge the colour of the solids.
- YieldReckon on roughly three-quarters to four-fifths by weight; a pound of butter gives something like 12 to 13 oz of clarified fat. What is left behind is a watery, milky residue worth saving for a sauce or mash.
- Why botherClarified butter smokes around 450F rather than the 300F or so of whole butter, so it fries and sautés without speckling black. That, not shelf life, is the usual modern reason to make it.
- "Tie it down securely"A jar covered with paper or bladder and string, in a cold larder. A screw-top jar in the refrigerator does the same job better. Properly separated clarified butter keeps for months chilled, but any water or solids carried over will sour it within weeks, so err on the side of leaving some behind.
- Not quite gheeIndian ghee is cooked further, until the settled solids toast and give the fat a nutty flavour and darker colour. This method stops short of that, leaving a paler, more neutral fat.
Clarifying butter solved a problem that no longer presses on most kitchens: butter made in quantity at midsummer had to survive until winter, and it was the buttermilk and water trapped in it that turned it rancid. Rendering out the fat and sealing it under a tied cover was a common preserving step, alongside potting meat under a butter seal, which used the same clarified fat as an airtight lid. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gives more than one way to do it, and this second version is the frugal one: it argues against straining on the grounds that too much good fat is wasted.