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Maitre d'Hotel Butter
1 heaping tablespoonful of butter; 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley; 1 tablespoonful lemon juice; 1/2 teaspoon salt; 1/2 saltspoon pepper. Rub the butter to a cream, add the lemon juice, parsley, salt, and pepper; stirring constantly until smooth. Serve with broiled fish or beefsteak, spread over the top.
A compound butter, and one of the few nineteenth-century recipes that needs no adjustment beyond clarifying its measures. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature: the butter must be soft but never melted.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon — a couple of good grinds of pepper. Use white pepper if you want no black flecks in the finished butter.
- A heaping tablespoonfulRoughly 1 1/2 tablespoons, or a little under an ounce. Doubling or tripling is sensible; the butter keeps well and this quantity will dress only two or three portions.
- Butter temperature"Rub to a cream" means work cool, pliable butter with a spoon or spatula until it is smooth and lightened. If it warms much past cool room temperature it turns greasy and takes up the lemon juice poorly.
- Adding the acidDribble the lemon juice in a few drops at a time, beating between additions. Poured in at once it tends to pool and the butter can separate.
- SaltThe half teaspoon suggests unsalted or only lightly salted butter. With modern salted butter, start with a pinch and taste.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work, but chop it fine and dry it thoroughly in a towel first — wet parsley thins the butter and dulls its colour.
- ServingChill the finished butter until firm, then either spoon a knob onto the hot fish or steak, or roll it in parchment into a log, refrigerate, and cut coins. The point is that it melts on contact and makes its own sauce.
Maitre d'hotel butter — from the French for the head of the household or the man who ran the dining room — is the plainest member of the family of beurres composes, compound butters worked cold with seasonings and set over hot food to melt into an instant sauce. It appears in English-language cookbooks from around the middle of the nineteenth century onward and was associated with hotel and restaurant cooking, where a seasoned butter kept ready was quicker than a made-to-order sauce. The recipe itself points equally to broiled fish and to beefsteak.