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Maître D'Hotel Sauce for Fish
With two tablespoons of butter cream in one-half teaspoon of salt, one-eighth teaspoonful of white pepper, and a tablespoon each of lemon juice and powdered parsley. Keep very cold till ready to serve with fish.
This is a compound butter rather than a poured sauce — it is worked cold and melts over hot fish at the table. Two things decide whether it works: the butter must be soft but not oily, and the lemon juice must go in slowly.
- "Cream in" means beat, not meltBring the butter to about 65F, soft enough to take an impression but still opaque, and beat the seasonings into it with a fork or small spatula. Melted butter will not hold the lemon juice and will separate into a greasy puddle.
- Add the lemon juice a few drops at a timeA full tablespoon of juice into two tablespoons of butter is a high proportion of liquid. Dribbled in with constant beating it emulsifies; poured in at once it breaks and weeps.
- Powdered parsleyPeriod books mean dried parsley rubbed through a sieve to a fine powder. A tablespoon of finely minced fresh parsley gives better colour and flavour; if using dried, a teaspoon is plenty, since drying concentrates it.
- White pepper for a reasonWhite pepper -- An eighth teaspoon is a light touch, and white pepper presumably keeps the finished butter pale and unspeckled. Black pepper works but changes the look.
- "Keep very cold"Roll the finished butter in parchment into a cylinder, chill until firm, and cut coins to lay on the hot fish as it goes out. It can also be pressed into a small pot and served with a knife.
- YieldTwo tablespoons of butter is about one ounce; with the lemon juice the finished butter comes to roughly an ounce and a half -- enough for two to four modest portions of grilled or fried fish. It keeps a week refrigerated and several months frozen.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon is a great deal of salt for two tablespoons of butter, and the direction may assume unsalted butter. With salted butter, cut it to a good pinch and taste before chilling, since cold butter tastes less salty than it will on hot fish.
Maître d'hôtel butter takes its name from the head steward of a French household. It became a fixture of nineteenth-century restaurant service, laid on grilled steaks, chops and above all plain broiled or fried fish, where the melting butter supplied both sauce and seasoning at once.