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Butter, Fairy
Blanch and pound two ounces of sweet almonds, adding a little orange-flower water. Wash a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and beat it to a paste with six yolks of hard boiled eggs, a little grated lemon-peel, and sifted loaf sugar. Mix all together with a wooden spoon, and work it through a colander. Serve it, on biscuit soaked in wine, piled up very high. Probable cost, without wine, 1s. 6d.
A cold sweetmeat rather than a butter for bread: the point is the texture, forced into fine threads and heaped so it stays airy. Everything else is subordinate to that.
- The hinge: force it through, don't stir itThe mixture is pushed through the colander the recipe calls for (a coarse sieve or ricer does the same job) straight onto the serving dish and left alone, so it lands as loose strands. Smoothing or re-mixing the pile collapses the effect the dish is built around.
- Working temperatureThe butter needs to be soft enough to pass the holes but cool enough to hold a thread. Around 65F works; if it starts to look greasy or separates, chill the bowl briefly and beat again.
- Washing the butterKneading fresh butter under cold water removed residual buttermilk, which soured quickly in an unrefrigerated larder. With modern salted or unsalted butter the step is unnecessary, though unsalted is the right choice here.
- Loaf sugarSugar came as a hard cone to be nipped and pounded; "sifted loaf sugar" is simply sifted icing or caster sugar. No quantity is given, and the original assumes the cook will sweeten to taste — start with about 2 oz to the 4 oz of butter.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still strong. A quarter teaspoon into 2 oz of pounded almonds is plenty; more turns the dish soapy. It also serves the older purpose of keeping the almonds from oiling as they are pounded.
- AlmondsBlanched, skinned almonds pounded to a paste. Ground almonds work, but the texture is drier — add a teaspoon of the orange-flower water and pound them briefly in a mortar rather than using them straight from the packet. "Sweet" almonds simply distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which are not used here.
- Hard-boiled yolksSix yolks to 4 oz butter is a great deal of yolk, and it is what gives the colour and the crumbly body. Push them through a sieve while still warm before beating them in, or they stay lumpy.
- The biscuit and wineSponge fingers, ratafias or naples biscuits, moistened with sweet sherry or Madeira — damp, not sodden. Assemble shortly before serving; the base goes to paste if it stands.
- YieldEnough for about six small servings as an end-of-meal sweet. Serve cold.
Fairy butter belongs to the English dessert course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and versions appear in Hannah Glasse and her successors well before Cassell's gathered it up in the 1870s. The name is generally said to refer to the appearance rather than any ingredient: pressed through a sieve, the almond-and-yolk paste falls in fine threads that were, by tradition at least, thought delicate enough for fairies. It is a characteristic trick of the period's confectionery, where a small number of rich ingredients — butter, pounded almonds, sugar, boiled yolks — were made to look elaborate through manipulation alone, no cooking involved. Orange-flower water, imported and expensive, was a fashionable perfume for such dishes, and the probable cost of 1s. 6d. marks this as a genteel rather than an everyday sweet.