Butter, Clarified
Put the butter in a basin before the fire, and when it melts, stir it round once or twice and let it settle. Do not strain it unless absolutely necessary, as it causes so much Pour it gently off into a clean dry jar, carefully leaving all sediment behind. Let it cool, and carefully exclude the air by means of a bladder or piece of washleather tied over. If the butter is salt, it may be washed before melting, when it is to be used for sweet dishes.
Butter, Constituent Parts of. -This article of food so largely used in England and the Continent is now made in very great quantities in factories in the United States and Sweden. A great deal of butter of good quality is imported to England from both Ireland and Holland, and our own best fresh butter comes from Buckinghamshire, Suffolk, Devonshire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire. In Devonshire the butter is made from the clotted cream for which that county is famous and the process of turning it into butter is but a short one.
In other parts it is reckoned that the butter should come in about 15 minutes churning, but it must be remembered that the temperature of the cream must be exact, and the thermometer of the dairy when churning begins should register from 55 to 60.
Butter contains a large amount of heatgiving properties, but the flesh-forming ones in it are very small and, with regard to its dietetic qualities, may be regarded almost in the light of animal oil or vegetable fat.
CONSTITUENT PARTS OF 1 LB. OF BUTTER.
Water ...
Albumenoids ...
Starch, Sugar, etc.... 1 262 oz. grs. ... ... ... ... ... 0 70 ... ... 0 21 Fat 14 14 Mineral Matter ... ... ... 0 70 ... ... ...
Butter. Curled. -Tie a strong cloth BUTTER, MELTED. the wall; make a knot with the other two ends, so that a stick might pass through. Put the butter into the cloth; twist it tightly over a dish, into which the butter will fall through the knot, so forming sma'l and pretty little strings. The butter may then be garnished with parsley, if to serve with a cheese course; or it may be sent to table plain for breakfast, in an ornamental CURLED BUTTER. dish. Squirted butter for garnishing hams, salads, eggs, &c., is made by forming a piece of stiff paper in the shape of a cornet, and squeezing the butter in fine strings from the hole at the bottom. Scooped butter is made by dipping a teaspoon or scooper in warm water, and then scooping the butter quickly and thin. In warm weather, it would not be necessary to heat the spoon.
The entry is really a keeping method: butter melted gently, decanted off its sediment, and sealed for storage. It works, but the gentle-melting approach leaves more water behind than a modern cook expects, which matters for how long the result lasts.
- The hinge: settle, then pour, never scrapeThe whole point is separating three layers — foam on top, clear fat in the middle, milk solids and water beneath. Pour slowly and stop the moment the sediment stirs; a splash of solids will make the butter catch and go rancid faster.
- "Before the fire" means very low heat"Before the fire" means gentle, indirect heat -- Melt in a basin set over hot water or in a heavy pan on the lowest burner, well short of a boil. Boiling drives the solids up into the fat and clouds the whole batch.
- This is not gheeButter melted and decanted still carries a little water and will not keep as long as ghee, which is simmered until the solids brown and all moisture has cooked off. If you want months of keeping, that longer cooking is what does it.
- Skip the bladder and washleatherThese were the Victorian answer to airtight storage. A clean glass jar with a screw lid does the same job better. Refrigerate the result: a gently clarified butter with residual moisture is best treated as a fridge item, good for a few weeks.
- Washing salt butterKnead the butter under several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, then press out as much water as you can before melting. Salt butter of this period was generally salted more heavily than modern salted butter, so with modern butter the step may not be needed unless the salt would tell in a sweet dish.
- YieldA pound of butter gives somewhere around 12 to 14 oz of clarified fat; the table in this entry puts the fat content of a pound at close to 14 oz. The loss is water and milk solids.
- Why botherWith the solids gone the smoke point rises to about 450F, which is why clarified butter is the fat for frying, for hollandaise, and for sealing potted meat and fish.
- Curled and squirted butterThe trailing paragraphs are table decoration, not cooking. A piping bag with a small star tube does the "squirted" work; the cloth-and-knot method needs butter at cool room temperature or it simply smears.
Clarifying was a storage technology before it was a cooking technique. Butter made in quantity in spring and summer had to survive months without refrigeration, and removing the milk solids — the part that spoils — was one of the standard defences, alongside heavy salting and potting under a seal of fat. The surrounding notes in this entry catch British dairying at a particular moment: factory butter arriving from the United States and Sweden, imports from Ireland and Holland, and named English counties still trading on reputation, with Devonshire's clotted-cream butter as the local speciality. The churning temperature given, 55 to 60F, is the traditional range still cited for butter-making, and the crude nutritional table — heat-giving versus flesh-forming — reflects the late-Victorian habit of sorting foods into fuel and tissue-builders, a scheme that predates modern understanding of fats and vitamins.