Butter, Montpelier
INGREDIENTS. - Watercress, fresh butter, pepper or cayenne, salt.
Pick the leaves from the cress, which must be green and fresh, chop them finely, dry them in a cloth and mince again, then knead up with fresh butter till it is of a bright green, seasoning with pepper or cayenne, and salt.
This is useful for spreading croûtons to make a garnish for savoury dishes, or for appetisans.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A compound butter given without weights, as Beeton's shorter entries often are. The proportions are yours to set, but the handling is not.
- The hinge: dry the cressWatercress holds a great deal of water, and water will make the butter break into a grainy, weeping mess. Squeeze the chopped leaves hard in a clean cloth or several layers of paper towel before the second mincing, and work them into butter that is soft but not melted.
- A workable proportionFor 4 oz (115 g) of softened unsalted butter, use the picked leaves of one generous bunch of watercress, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups packed. That gives the "bright green" the recipe asks for. Less cress reads as pale and vaguely peppery rather than green.
- "Fresh butter"In Beeton's usage this means unsalted and newly made, as opposed to the heavily salted keeping butter of the larder. Use unsalted butter and season it yourself, which is what the salt at the end of the ingredient list is for.
- CroûtonsNot the small cubes sold for salads. Here they are shapes of bread, usually fried in butter or clarified fat and drained, cut into rounds, triangles or fingers to carry the butter as a garnish.
- "Appetisans"Most likely a rendering of appetisers, meaning small savoury bites; in Victorian dining savouries were often served at the end of a meal as well as before it. Modern equivalents are canapes and toasts.
- Pepper or cayenneCayenne turns up often in Victorian savoury butters and is used in pinches, not spoonfuls. Start with a scant 1/8 teaspoon for 4 oz of butter and taste; watercress already brings its own mustard-oil heat.
- Chilling and shapingRoll the finished butter in parchment into a cylinder and chill until firm, then cut coins as needed. It keeps three or four days refrigerated before the green dulls, and freezes well for a month.
- ServingUse it cold or barely softened. Melted onto a hot steak or fish it still tastes good, but the colour turns drab and the cress loses its edge, so add it at the table.
Montpellier butter, beurre de Montpellier, belongs to the French cold-larder repertoire and is likely to have reached English kitchens through the professional chefs of the nineteenth century, where it was used chiefly to mask and decorate cold fish and to bed out garnishes. The full classical version is a good deal more elaborate than this one: a pounded paste of blanched herbs, spinach or cress for colour, with anchovy, capers, gherkin, shallot, hard egg yolk and sometimes oil worked in. Beeton's entry strips it to the single element that does the visible work, the green, which may suggest how such preparations were used in a Victorian household kitchen, less as a sauce in its own right than as an edible pigment for croutons and garnish. The link to the town of Montpellier is generally traced to nothing more than fashion in naming, and is not documented; the butter does appear under that name in French cookery writing some decades before Beeton, and watercress, sold cheaply on London streets and available year-round from the Kentish beds, made it a dish that could truthfully be called seasonable at any time.