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Butter, to Preserve, Without Salt
Dissolve the butter very gently in a clean pan over the fire. All the watery particles will evaporate, and the curd--which is the cause of the butter becoming rancid--will fall to the bottom. It should not boil. Pour the butter into a clean vessel, keeping out the sediment, and excluding the air by means of a bladder tied over the top. When cool it resembles lard. It will also lose some of its flavour, but it is superior to salt butter for culinary uses, and especially for pastry.
This is clarified butter, and the whole method turns on driving off the water and leaving the milk solids behind. A few notes translate it to a modern stove and a modern container.
- The hinge: never let it boilHeld below a simmer, the water evaporates quietly and the milk solids settle as a pale sediment. A hard boil throws the solids up into the foam and works them back through the fat, which is exactly what the recipe is trying to remove. Very low heat, roughly twenty to thirty minutes for a pound, no stirring once the foam rises.
- Judging the finishThe butter is done when the surface stops sputtering and goes still and clear, and you can read print through it. Sputtering means water is still leaving. Any residual moisture is what shortens keeping life.
- Straining, not just pouring"Keeping out the sediment" is easier through a fine sieve lined with a double layer of muslin or a coffee filter. Stop pouring while an inch of liquid still covers the browned solids rather than chasing the last of it.
- The bladderA cleaned animal bladder tied over a crock was the period's airtight seal. A sterilised glass jar with a tight lid does the same job; fill it while the butter is warm and liquid so it sets with no air pockets.
- "Resembles lard"Clarified butter generally sets opaque and pale gold, and often grainy, at room temperature, depending on how fast it cools. It should smell nutty and clean, never cheesy.
- Keeping itWell-clarified butter in a sealed jar keeps for months in a cool dark cupboard and close to indefinitely refrigerated. Light and warmth are what turn it, so a cupboard beats a windowsill. Discard any batch that smells sharp or crayon-like.
- Why it suits pastryRemoving the water and salt gives a fat of predictable behaviour, which matters where a recipe balances liquid precisely. It has a higher smoke point than whole butter, useful for frying, though it will not laminate puff pastry the way cold whole butter does.
- YieldA pound of butter gives roughly 12 to 13 oz of clarified fat, a loss of about a fifth to water and solids.
Clarifying butter to keep it is one of the oldest solutions to a problem that dominated dairy households before refrigeration: butter goes rancid, and it is the milk solids and residual buttermilk, not the fat, that go first. The alternative was salt, sometimes in punishing quantity, which is one reason clarifying appealed to cooks who wanted butter without the salt they could not then cook around. The same technique produces the ghee of South Asian kitchens and the smen of North Africa, both traditionally kept for months or deliberately aged; European cookery books often treat it as a keeping trick, though it appears as a cooking ingredient in its own right as well. The bladder tied over the crock is the period's ordinary sealing material, cheap and available from the butcher, and it appears in nineteenth-century preserving instructions for everything from potted meats to pickles.