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MONTPELLIER BUTTER (Beurre de Montpellier)
Take equal quantities (about a handful of each) of tarragon, chervil, and pimpernel, together with a small quantity of chives, and place them in boiling water to blanch. Then remove them, allow them to cool, and drain off all the water adhering to them. Then dry them on a cloth, and compress them to remove all moisture. Now place them in a mortar, with a clove of garlic, a handful of capers, the yolks of eight eggs boiled hard, the same number of anchovies, and some gherkins. Beat them together for five minutes, and then add one pound of good butter; season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and again beat them up together until perfectly mixed, a wine-glassful of the finest olive-oil being added during the process. When well mixed, pour on it, by little and little, a quart of vinaigre a l'estragon (vinegar flavoured with tarragon). Colour the preparation with the green colouring prepared from spinach-leaves. When the whole is thoroughly mixed, remove it from the mortar, and place it in a suitable vessel for sending to table.
A classic French compound butter, closer to a stiff green sauce than to a spread. It is a mortar recipe, and the order of work matters more than the exact herb quantities.
- The hinge: keep it cold and add the liquid slowlyButter, oil and vinegar here form an emulsion held by hard yolk. Work everything at cool room temperature and add the oil and vinegar in driblets, as instructed; poured in fast, or into warm butter, it splits and weeps.
- The quart of vinegar is not credibleThe quart of vinegar looks implausible -- a quart of tarragon vinegar to one pound of butter is far more liquid than such an emulsion is likely to hold. Other versions of this butter call for much less, so add the vinegar cautiously and by taste rather than by the stated measure.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian usage roughly 2 fl oz, about a quarter cup.
- PimpernelThis means salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a cucumber-scented salad herb, not scarlet pimpernel. It is hard to find; parsley or a little watercress stands in without wrecking the balance.
- Blanching the herbsThirty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold water, sets the colour and kills the raw grassiness. Squeezing them bone dry in a cloth is not optional, since residual water is the other thing that breaks the emulsion.
- Spinach colouringThe period vert d'epinards was made by pounding raw spinach, straining the juice and setting the green solids by gentle heat. Well-blanched herbs give plenty of colour on their own; a small quantity of blanched spinach pounded in achieves the same end.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does this in a minute or two, but pulse the herbs, capers, anchovy, gherkin, garlic and yolk to a paste first, then add butter, then trickle in oil and vinegar. Overrunning the machine warms the butter.
- Yield and serviceA pound of butter plus additions makes roughly 700-800 g, enough for a large party. It is a cold-buffet preparation: mask poached salmon or cold chicken with it, or pipe it in rosettes. Refrigerate and use within about three days, as the anchovy and fresh herbs do not keep.
Montpellier butter belongs to the cold larder of nineteenth-century French grande cuisine, where a decorated salmon or a chaud-froid of poultry was a set piece of the buffet table. It is one of a family of compound butters worked in a mortar with hard yolk and herbs, and it appears in the English cookery dictionaries of the period because the classical French repertoire was the model any ambitious professional kitchen was expected to know. The name is generally traced simply to the Languedoc city, though no particular origin story is documented; the herb mixture, tarragon and chervil above all, is thoroughly northern French rather than Mediterranean. It functions as a foundation preparation, something a cook makes in quantity and then draws on, rather than a dish in its own right.