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Butter Sauce, or Oiled Butter
Take as much fresh butter as will be wanted, and melt it, but do not let it brown. Skim it, pour it out, let it rest a minute, then drain it from the curd at the bottom, add salt, and serve. This simple sauce is quickly made, and is generally much liked.
This is clarified butter under an older name: melt, skim, decant off the milk solids, salt. The whole thing turns on gentle heat.
- Keep the heat lowThe recipe's one instruction is not to let the butter brown, so use the lowest burner setting or a bain-marie; once the milk solids colour you have brown butter, which is a different sauce entirely.
- "Oiled butter" is not oiled at allNineteenth-century writers used "oiled" for butter that had been melted until it broke into clear fat and watery curd, as distinct from the period's "melted butter," which was generally a flour-thickened sauce. Nothing is added but salt.
- Skim, then decantThe foam that rises is whey protein; the sediment at the bottom is casein and water. Skim the top, let it stand off the heat a full minute so the solids settle, then pour off the gold fat and stop before the cloudy layer follows.
- Use unsalted butter"Fresh butter" in period usage generally means unsalted, salted butter being kept for storage. The recipe salts at the end, after clarifying, so you can judge it.
- YieldExpect to lose something like a fifth of the weight to water and solids: 8 oz butter gives roughly 6 1/2 oz of clear sauce. The recipe sets no quantity, calling only for as much as will be wanted, to dress asparagus, boiled fish or new potatoes.
- Serve warm, not hotClarified butter has no emulsion to hold it together, so it will not cling to food the way a beurre blanc does. Send it out in a warm jug or sauceboat; if it cools it sets solid and needs remelting.
- Keeping itWith the milk solids gone it keeps far longer than butter — several weeks refrigerated, sealed. It also fries at a higher temperature than whole butter.
Clarifying butter is a long-established fat-preserving technique in the European kitchen, and the reason is storage rather than flavour: the milk solids and water are what spoil, so removing them turns a perishable dairy product into something that will sit in a crock for weeks. The distinction the entry quietly draws is worth noting: to a Victorian cook, "melted butter" generally meant a flour-thickened sauce served with fish and vegetables, and it was common enough to draw comment from French writers. This entry describes the plainer alternative, closer to what a modern kitchen means by drawn or clarified butter, and close in principle to Indian ghee, though ghee is cooked further until the solids toast and give it a nutty flavour.