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Maitre D'Hotel Butter
2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon white pepper 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Cream butter; add gradually salt and pepper, lemon juice, parsley. Keep very cold. Serve with fried fish or broiled steak.
A compound butter that needs no cooking; the only difficulties are proportion and temperature.
- YieldTwo tablespoons of butter makes roughly enough for two portions of fish or two steaks. Scale up freely — the ratio holds at any quantity.
- Butter temperature"Cream butter" means soft enough to beat smooth but not melted — cool room temperature, not warm. Melted butter will not hold the lemon juice in suspension and the mixture separates into greasy pools.
- Add the acid slowlyThe hinge of the recipe. A tablespoon of lemon juice into two tablespoons of butter is a great deal of liquid; dribble it in while beating so it emulsifies. Dumped in at once it breaks and weeps.
- White pepperLikely chosen partly for appearance, black flecks being thought untidy in a pale butter. Black pepper can be substituted, though it shows and tastes somewhat different.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both serve, but chop it fine and dry it well; wet parsley thins the butter and the parsley may dull in colour on standing.
- "Keep very cold"Roll the finished butter in parchment into a log, chill until firm, and cut coins to lay on the hot food at the table. It should melt on contact, not before.
- StorageBest within a few days refrigerated; it freezes well for some weeks. Cut the log into coins before freezing so you can take one at a time.
Beurre maître d'hôtel — the master- or steward-of-the-house butter — is among the plainest of the French compound butters, and by the nineteenth century it was a common finish for grilled meat and fried fish in professional kitchens. Escoffier lists it among the basic beurres composés. The technique underlies a whole family of variants — anchovy butter, garlic butter, beurre de Montpellier — all built on the same principle of beating flavourings into softened butter and chilling it hard.