Fairy Butter
INGREDIENTS for goodsized dish. 1/4 lb. of fresh butter, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of pounded sugar, 1 tablespoonful of orangeflower water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Boil the eggs hard, and, when cold, take out the yolks, and pound them in a mortar with the sugar and the orange-flower water to a smooth paste, then incorporate with it the butter. Put the paste in an old, clean, coarse cloth, and force it through by wringing the cloth hard and squeezing the butter through it. The butter should then drop on the dish or plate in irregular pieces according to the holes in the cloth, and should have a pretty effect. Plain butter may be done in the same manner.
A Victorian table butter: hard-boiled yolks, sugar and orange-flower water worked into softened butter, then forced through cloth so it falls in ragged threads. It is a garnish for the bread plate rather than a spread for cooking.
- Butter quantityThe weight has lost its fraction in the original and reads only "lb. of fresh butter". Against 2 egg yolks and 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, a half-pound (225 g) gives the usual balance, but the figure as printed is not recoverable with certainty.
- Fresh butter"Fresh" here means unsalted, as distinct from the salted butter kept for storage. Use good unsalted butter and let it come fully to room temperature before working; cold butter will not take the yolk paste smoothly.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern or baking aisles, but modern bottles vary enormously in strength. A tablespoonful of a concentrated distillate will taste of soap; start with a teaspoon and taste.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in a mortar, roughly today's caster sugar. It must dissolve completely in the yolk paste or the finished butter will feel gritty.
- The hinge: a smooth paste firstThe yolks have to be pounded absolutely lump-free with the sugar and flower water before any butter goes in. Add butter to a grainy paste and the lumps never break down, and they will block the cloth.
- Forcing through the clothA doubled square of clean, open-weave muslin or cheesecloth twisted hard will do what the "coarse cloth" did. A potato ricer or a piping bag with a fine multi-hole nozzle gives the same broken, irregular strands with far less mess.
- Serving and yieldIf the half-pound reading is right, the quantity fills a small serving dish and would go round a table of several people. Chill the heaped butter briefly to set the shape, then serve cool but not hard.
- Average costThe 8d. is 1860s money, eightpence in pre-decimal currency, and reflects butter and eggs at Victorian London prices. It is of no use as a modern guide.
Butter presented as ornament rather than ingredient was a staple of the nineteenth-century breakfast and supper table, where it appeared moulded, stamped with a wooden print, curled with a scalding-water knife, or, as here, forced through cloth into a heap of irregular threads. The device is the same one still used for ricing potatoes, and it turns an unremarkable commodity into something the mistress of the house could set down as evidence of care. Orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, is often said to have been a common English flavouring before vanilla extract became cheap, and Mrs Beeton's book uses it freely in creams, cakes and sweet butters. The pounded yolks tint the butter a deeper gold, and the recipe closes by noting that plain butter may be treated the same way, without the yolks, for those who want the shape but not the sweetness.