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Salt Butter Made Fresh
Put a pound of salt butter in a wooden bowl kept very clean for the purpose, with a quart of water, and work it well, either with your hand or a wooden spoon, for twenty minutes; then pour away the water, and wash the butter well in seven or eight different waters. Add a very little fine salt, and make the butter into pats.
This is a salvage technique rather than a dish: it washes the salt out of heavily salted keeping butter so it can pass for fresh at table. The whole thing hinges on keeping everything cold, since warm butter smears and turns greasy instead of gathering.
- QuantitiesA pound of butter is 450 g, four standard sticks. An imperial quart of water is about 1.1 litres (a US quart, 950 ml, is close enough for the purpose).
- Water temperatureUse water as cold as you can get it, ice water for preference. The original gives no temperature; it was written for a colder kitchen than most modern ones, and tap water is often warm enough to soften the butter into a slick that will not release its brine.
- The bowlThe recipe calls for a wooden bowl kept solely for this job, though it gives no reason; wood is slow to draw heat and stays cool, but it also absorbs fat and odours, which may be why a dedicated bowl was wanted. Any bowl works if the butter is kept cold, and glass or stainless avoids the absorption problem.
- Working the butterPress and fold rather than beat. The aim is to squeeze salty water out of the butter mass, not to whip air into it. A wooden spatula or butter paddle does this better than a spoon.
- Twenty minutes, and the rinsesThe long working is what frees salt trapped inside the butter; the seven or eight changes of water carry it away. Fewer rinses with vigorous pressing between each will do the same job. Judge by tasting the butter, not by the look of the water, since brine runs clear.
- Drain it properlyAny water left behind will make the butter weep and spoil faster. Press hard, pour off, and pat the finished butter dry before shaping.
- The final saltThe recipe says only 'a very little'. Add a pinch and taste rather than working to a figure, since how much came out depends on how salty the original butter was.
- KeepingWashed butter has lost the salt that preserved it and has picked up water in the process, so it is now perishable. Refrigerate and use within a few days.
- YieldAbout a pound of finished butter, made up into table pats.
Before mechanical refrigeration, butter destined for storage or shipping was salted hard, sometimes to five or six per cent by weight, which kept it sound for months but made it unpleasant on bread. Household manuals of the nineteenth century therefore carried instructions like this one for reversing the process on the day it was wanted, and the same washing-and-working method appears in dairy books as a step in making fresh butter from freshly churned cream, where the object is to rinse out residual buttermilk rather than salt. What it represents is telling: this is not a dish but a piece of basic kitchen competence, the sort of thing a cook was expected to know because good fresh butter was seasonal and expensive while salt butter was always in the crock.