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Black Butter Sauce
4 tablespoons butter few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon parsley 2 tablespoons vinegar Brown butter, add remaining ingredients. Serve. 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt few drops onion juice
This is beurre noir, the classic French brown-butter-and-vinegar sauce, reduced here to about twenty words. The printed ingredient list has clearly collided with the recipe that followed it on the page.
- The stray ingredientsThe second group — 2 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 teaspoon salt, few drops onion juice — appears to be the start of a separate roux-based sauce from a neighbouring entry. It has nothing to do with black butter, and adding flour here would ruin the sauce. Use only the first four items.
- How dark is "black"The name is traditional overstatement. Cook the butter over medium heat until the milk solids are hazelnut brown and the smell turns nutty, roughly 3 to 5 minutes; genuinely blackened butter is acrid and should be discarded.
- Add the vinegar off the heatThis is the hinge. Two tablespoons of cold vinegar hitting hot butter will spit violently and can foam over the pan. Pull the pan off the burner, stand back, then pour.
- Which vinegarCider or plain white vinegar would have been the likely choices in an American kitchen of this period. Wine vinegar is closer to the French original; whichever you use, the sauce should taste sharp, not merely buttery.
- ParsleyOne tablespoon means finely chopped fresh parsley, not dried. It goes in with the vinegar so it wilts rather than fries.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is period shorthand for the smallest pinch you can pick up — well under 1/8 teaspoon. The heat should be undetectable as heat.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1/3 cup, enough for two servings. Traditionally spooned over poached skate or other white fish, over calf's brains, or over poached eggs; it also suits boiled cauliflower or asparagus.
- Serve at onceThe sauce separates and dulls as it cools. Make it while the fish or vegetable is on its plate, not before.
Black butter is a direct import from French cookery — beurre noir, related to but distinct from beurre noisette, hazelnut butter, the paler browning stage — and its most famous partner is skate, raie au beurre noir. The technique is old and simple: butter cooked until its milk solids toast and give up a nutty flavour, then sharpened with an acid to cut the fat. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book (1907), a volume published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and best remembered for its confectionery, reflects how thoroughly French sauce vocabulary had entered American middle-class cooking by the turn of the century, largely through the cooking-school movement.