Butter Sauce
Take eight ounces of butter, one tablespoon of salt, one of pepper, and two tablespoons of lemon juice. Stir with a wooden spoon over the fire until the butter is half melted, then take it off and continue to stir until it is quite liquid. By taking the butter off the stove before it is all melted it will have a pleasant taste of fresh cream; this is all lost otherwise.
A warm butter sauce built on one idea: never let the butter get hot enough to break. Everything else here is seasoning, and the seasoning as printed needs a second look.
- The hinge: take it off half meltedThe residual heat of the pan finishes the job while you stir, which keeps the butter cloudy rather than separating into clear fat and milky solids. Heated further it splits, and the fresh-cream flavour the author is after disappears.
- The salt and pepper are almost certainly overstatedA full tablespoon of salt to 8 oz of butter is on the order of 6 to 8 percent salt by weight, well past palatable, and a tablespoon of ground pepper will dominate everything. Read both as teaspoons at most, and season to taste; salted butter needs less again.
- Wooden spoon, and whyThe recipe does not say why, but a wooden spoon conducts little heat and lets you work the butter gently without scraping it against a hot metal pan.
- Use the lowest heat you haveA small heavy saucepan over the lowest burner setting, or the pan set on a warm surface off the heat, gives far better control than a moderate flame. Some cooks prefer to melt it in a bowl over barely steaming water.
- Butter quantityEight ounces is two American sticks, 225 g. That is a generous amount of sauce.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; this much would plausibly serve six to eight poured over boiled or steamed vegetables, poached fish, or plain pasta. Serve it at once in a warmed jug; it will not survive reheating without splitting, though a splash of hot water whisked in can sometimes bring a broken sauce back together.
This is melted butter with lemon in its plainest form, and its presence in a book of simple Italian cookery is a reminder that in the north, where butter rather than oil was the everyday fat, such a dressing could stand on its own rather than serve as a shortcut. Antonia Isola's Simple Italian Cookery was published in 1912 for American readers at a moment when Italian food in the United States was still being introduced dish by dish, and the book's virtue is exactly this kind of entry: no roux, no stock, no reduction, just an insistence on temperature. The advice to stop short of full melting so the butter retains "a pleasant taste of fresh cream" is sound sensory observation of what heat does to butterfat, and it reflects the same discipline that governs beurre monté and beurre blanc.