Butter, Fairy
INGREDIENTS. - The yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, 1. tablespoonful of orange-flower water, 2 tablespoonfuls of pounded sugar, 1/4 lb. of good fresh butter. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Beat the yolks of the eggs smoothly in a mortar, with the orange-flower water and the sugar, until the whole is reduced to a fine paste; add the butter and force all through BRITTANY BUTTER. an old but clean cloth by wringing the cloth and squeezing the butter very hard. The butter will then drop on the plate in large and small pieces, according to the holes in the cloth. Plain butter may be done in the same manner, and is very quickly prepared, besides having a very good effect.
A sweetened butter for the tea table, pressed through cloth into curls and crumbs. Two things decide whether it works: the yolks must be worked to a genuinely smooth paste before the butter joins them, and everything must be cool enough to hold its shape when forced through.
- The stray line of type"BRITTANY BUTTER" in the middle of the method is a heading from the surrounding text that has intruded into the sentence. Ignore it; the sentence reads straight through from "force all through" to "an old but clean cloth."
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of butter is 4 oz / 115 g, one American stick. Two tablespoons of sugar and one of orange-flower water go a long way in that volume, so the result is a flavoured butter rather than a confection.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in the mortar - what would now be sold as caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will stay gritty in an uncooked paste; icing sugar works but brings cornflour with it.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries and better supermarkets, but modern bottles vary enormously in strength. Start with two teaspoons, taste, and add the rest only if it needs it - overdone, it tastes of soap.
- Butter temperature"Good fresh butter" here means unsalted and cool, not soft. Work it at cool room temperature: too warm and it will smear through the cloth as a paste instead of dropping in distinct pieces.
- The mortarA small food processor does the yolk paste in seconds, but pulse the butter in only briefly at the end - overworking warms it. A fine sieve and the back of a spoon is closer to the original texture.
- The clothA clean square of loose-weave muslin or cheesecloth, gathered and twisted hard. A potato ricer or a coarse sieve gives the same effect with less mess, and the hole size is what determines whether you get threads or crumbs.
- Chilling and servingChill the pieces on the serving plate before they go to table or they slump; a short spell in the fridge is usually enough. The recipe gives no yield, but four ounces of butter should serve several people alongside bread and butter, muffins or plain cake.
Fairy butter appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward - Hannah Glasse gives a version with orange-flower water and hard yolks much like this one - and the name is often said to refer to the fine, fairy-fine threads the butter makes as it comes through the cloth, a trick of presentation rather than of flavour. Before piping bags, a cloth or a ricer seem to have served for making butter look like something other than a lump, though the details are hard to pin down. Orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, was a standard sweet flavouring in British kitchens well into the nineteenth century, sitting on the shelf beside rosewater and used where a modern cook would reach for vanilla. Mrs Beeton's costing of sevenpence places it firmly among the small refinements of a household that could afford a quarter-pound of good butter for a garnish, and her closing note - that plain butter treated the same way "has a very good effect" - is the practical Victorian housekeeper speaking over the shoulder of the confectioner.