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Butter, Creamed
Cut the butter in pieces or slices and drain the water well from it; soften it slightly before the fire if it is hard (not else), and then with the back of a strong wooden spoon beat it until it resembles thick cream. For large rich pastry.
A method rather than a dish: this is the preliminary step of bringing butter to a plastic, spreadable state before it goes into rich pastry. Everything hinges on softening without melting.
- The one thing that mattersThe butter must stay cool and waxy, firm but taking a fingerprint easily. Once any part of it melts the butter oils out, and the pastry it goes into will be greasy rather than flaky.
- "Before the fire"A gentle radiant warmth, not direct heat. Modern equivalent: leave the cut pieces on the counter for 20–30 minutes, or set the bowl briefly on top of a warm oven. Do not use a microwave, which melts the interior while the outside is still firm.
- Draining the waterNineteenth-century butter was hand-worked and often held pockets of buttermilk and wash water, which would make pastry heavy and could turn it sour. Commercial butter today must contain at least 80 percent fat and is worked consistently enough to need no draining, though higher-fat European-style butters are probably closest to what the book assumes.
- Salted or notUnsalted is the safer choice for pastry, since salt levels in salted butter vary. If you use salted, reduce or omit the salt in the dough.
- ToolsThe back of a strong wooden spoon against the side of a bowl still works and gives you good control of the temperature. A stand mixer with the paddle on low does the same job in a minute or two; avoid the whisk, which beats in air you do not want in laminated or short pastry.
- "Thick cream"The target texture is smooth, pale and homogeneous, thick but still soft enough to fall from the spoon - no lumps, no visible separation, no shine of free fat.
- "Large rich pastry"The recipe says only that the creamed butter is "for large rich pastry"; it does not name which doughs are meant.
Creaming as a distinct step belongs to the era before refrigeration and before butter arrived in a uniform, factory-worked block. Farm and dairy butter varied enormously in water content, salt, hardness and temperature, so any cookbook aiming at reliable pastry had to tell the cook how to bring butter to a known state first. It is a preparatory operation rather than a dish in itself. The instruction "soften it slightly before the fire if it is hard (not else)" is the whole nineteenth-century kitchen in one parenthesis, because a coal range gave you no fine control and butter that has once oiled cannot be brought back.