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Lemon Butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice Cream the butter, and add slowly lemon juice. 1/4 cup butter
A compound butter of two ingredients, meant to be dropped onto hot broiled fish or steak so it melts into a sauce. The whole trick is in the order of operations.
- Read the layoutThe double-column format has scrambled the text: the ingredients are 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 1/4 cup butter, and the method is the single sentence between them. Nothing is missing.
- Quantities1/4 cup butter is 4 tablespoons, half a standard American stick, about 2 oz or 57 g. Use unsalted if you want to control the seasoning; the recipe as written calls for no salt at all.
- The hingeAdd the lemon juice a few drops at a time, beating between additions. Poured in at once, the acid and water will not hold in the fat and the butter breaks into a grainy, weeping mess.
- Temperature"Cream the butter" means work it soft with a wooden spoon or paddle at cool room temperature. Melted butter will not emulsify, and butter straight from the refrigerator is too firm to take the juice smoothly.
- SeasoningSalt and white pepper are worth adding. The book carries other cold butters worked up the same way, among them maitre d'hotel butter with chopped parsley and anchovy butter with anchovy paste.
- Yield and servingAbout 1/3 cup, enough for four to six servings. Roll it in parchment, chill until firm, and cut coins to set on broiled fish, steak or asparagus at the moment of serving; it should melt on the plate, never be heated in a pan.
- KeepingRefrigerated and wrapped, it holds a week; frozen, several months. Lemon does not preserve it, so treat it as fresh dairy.
Cold compound butters were a fixture of nineteenth-century French service, and American cooking-school teaching took them up as the tidiest possible "sauce" for grilled fish and meat: no roux, no reduction, nothing to curdle at the last minute. The book groups this with its other butter sauces, such as maitre d'hotel butter and anchovy butter, which is part of why the instruction here is so terse. The name is literal rather than fanciful, and worth flagging because "lemon butter" in British and Australian usage more often means lemon curd, a cooked mixture of eggs, sugar and lemon spread on bread. This one is a savoury seasoning and would be inedible on toast.