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Green-Butter Sandwiches
INGREDIENTS. ¼ a pound of butter. 6 anchovies. 1/8 a peck of spinach. 2 tablespoonfuls of very fine-chopped parsley. 2 teaspoonfuls of very finechopped capers.
Method. - Boil the spinach, drain thoroughly, and press through a piece of muslin. Beat the butter to a cream with a wooden spoon; beat into the butter enough of the spinach pulp to give the required tint of green. Wipe the oil from the anchovies, remove the backbone, and pass through a hair sieve; then add to the colored butter, a little at a time; add also the parsley and capers; chill slightly and use as a filling for sandwiches.
These butters are used also to mask or decorate cooked fish for "cold service."
A compound butter in the French manner, tinted with spinach and sharpened with anchovy. The work is all in getting the spinach dry enough that the butter does not break.
- The butterThe quantity was checked against the printed page: a quarter pound of butter, which is half a cup, or one standard stick. Let it come fully to room temperature before you start beating.
- An eighth of a peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, so this is a quart of raw leaves — only a few ounces once weighed, cooking down to a couple of tablespoons of pulp. You need far less than that for colour; the surplus is insurance.
- Dryness is the hingeWater is what ruins a green butter. After boiling, squeeze the spinach hard in muslin or a clean tea towel until no more liquid comes, then squeeze again. Wet pulp will curdle the butter into a weeping, streaky paste.
- AnchoviesThe book assumes whole salt-cured fish packed in oil, boned at home — hence the backbone. Modern tinned fillets are already boned; six whole anchovies amount to about twelve fillets, roughly a small tin. Mash them to a smooth paste rather than forcing them through a sieve.
- A hair sieveA fine-mesh horsehair sieve, once standard for purées. A fine stainless sieve does the same job, and for both spinach and anchovy a small food processor is quicker and gives a smoother result.
- Tint to tasteAdd the spinach pulp a teaspoon at a time. Too much pulp dulls the butter's texture before it improves the shade.
- SaltNo salt is called for, and none should be added until the anchovies and capers are in — between them they carry a good deal.
- Yield and keepingHalf a cup of butter fills about eight to ten small sandwiches. Rolled in parchment, it keeps a week refrigerated and freezes well; slice coins from the log to finish grilled fish.
Green butter belongs to the family of French compound butters, of which the most elaborate is beurre de Montpellier — herbs, spinach, anchovy, capers and sometimes egg yolk, pounded into butter and used to coat cold salmon and other fish for the buffet table. The book's closing line, that these butters also "mask or decorate cooked fish for cold service," gives the game away: this is a chef's larder preparation borrowed for the tea table. Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) was written for American housekeepers at the height of the fashion for dainty, cold, quickly assembled food — the chafing dish and the sandwich plate were both signs of a household entertaining without a full kitchen staff. Spinach here is a dye rather than a flavour, a habit of nineteenth-century professional cookery that also gave us the green colouring folded into forcemeats.