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Maître D'Hôtel Butter
2 tablespoons butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper 1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 tablespoon lemon juice Work the butter until creamy; add seasoning and parsley, then the lemon juice slowly, and mix until thoroughly smooth. Serve with broiled fish or shad roe.
A compound butter that takes five minutes and keeps a week. The whole trick is temperature and patience with the lemon juice.
- The hinge: add the juice drop by dropButter and lemon juice are an emulsion waiting to break. Beat the juice in a few drops at a time, working it fully in before the next addition, or the butter will weep and go grainy.
- Butter temperature"Work until creamy" means soft enough to cream with a spoon or fork but not melted, roughly 65F. Melted butter will not hold the juice at all. Leave it out an hour rather than microwaving it.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon of salt on two tablespoons of butter is generous if the butter is already salted, and the recipe does not say which to use. With salted butter, cut it to a pinch or leave it out and taste.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; chop it fine and dry, since wet parsley thins the butter. Chop just before mixing so it does not blacken.
- YieldAbout three tablespoons of finished butter, enough for two to four portions of fish. Scale up freely; the proportions hold.
- Shaping and storageRoll in parchment into a log, chill until firm, and cut coins to melt over hot fish. It keeps a week refrigerated and freezes for a couple of months.
- Shad roeAmerican shad roe is seasonal and increasingly scarce, and shad fisheries are closed or restricted in several states. Any broiled fish, a steak, or grilled vegetables take the butter just as well.
Maître d'hôtel butter is the plainest of the French compound butters, named for the head of the dining room rather than the kitchen — the sort of finish a steward could put together at the sideboard without a cook. Escoffier is often credited with fixing its form, but versions of parsley-and-lemon butter appear in French service writing well before him, and by the late nineteenth century it was standard in American and English household cookery as the default dressing for broiled fish and grilled meat. Its appearance in a book aimed at home cooks shows how thoroughly restaurant vocabulary had crossed into the domestic kitchen: no explanation of the name is offered, because none was thought necessary. The pairing with shad roe places it squarely in the American spring, when shad ran up the Atlantic rivers and the roe was a brief, eagerly awaited delicacy.