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Butter Preserved with Honey
Wash and press the butter until it is quite free from milk. Put it in a jar, and place it in a pan of boiling water. When clarified, and just before boiling, remove it from the water to a cool place; take off the scum, and work it up in the proportion of two ounces of honey to every two pounds of butter. This mode of preparation will be found very convenient where butter is eaten with sweet dishes. It will keep as long as salted butter if the air be properly excluded from it.
This is clarified butter — essentially ghee — sweetened with a little honey and sealed away from air. The technique is sound, but the keeping claim belongs to an era of cool larders and daily butter-making.
- The hinge: get every trace of milk outButter spoils because of the milk solids and water in it, not the fat. The washing, the slow clarifying and the careful skimming all serve that one end, and the finished fat should be clear gold with nothing cloudy left at the bottom. Pour it off through muslin rather than tipping the sediment in with it.
- "Just before boiling"Butter in a jar set in simmering water cannot exceed about 212F, which is the point of the method — it melts and separates without browning. Hold it there until the foam rises and the solids sink, roughly 20 to 30 minutes, then take it off before the water content spits and boils.
- Washing butterThis step assumes fresh farm butter still holding buttermilk. Work it with a wooden spoon or paddle under cold water, pressing and changing the water until it runs clear. Modern unsalted butter is already largely free of buttermilk, so the washing can be skipped.
- The proportionsTwo ounces of honey to two pounds of butter is about three tablespoons of honey to four cups (eight sticks). It is a whisper of sweetness, not a honey-butter spread.
- Working it inLet the clarified butter cool until it is thick and opaque but still soft, then beat the honey through it. Stirred into hot fat, honey sinks and can scorch, and the mixture will separate as it sets.
- Storage, honestlyClarified butter alone keeps well at cool room temperature; the honey adds a little moisture and sugar, so treat this as a refrigerator preserve in an airtight jar, with the surface covered and no crumbs or wet spoons introduced. It will hold for weeks cold, months frozen — not the open-larder year the book implies.
- YieldTwo pounds of butter clarifies down to roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 pounds of finished fat, somewhat over three cups, since about a fifth of the weight is water and milk solids that are discarded.
Butter was seasonal and perishable, and before mechanical refrigeration a dairy household needed a way to carry summer butter into winter: heavy salting, potting under a layer of clarified fat, or clarifying outright, which is the same principle that produces Indian ghee and North African smen. Salt was the usual preservative, and the drawback it carried is exactly what this entry addresses -- salted butter sits badly beside sweet dishes, so honey replaces salt as both flavouring and, in a small way, a hygroscopic keeping agent. Honey's reputation as a preservative is ancient and largely deserved for honey itself; in a mixture this dilute it does far less work than the removal of the milk.