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The Boston Cook Book
Mix vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and Worcestershire Sauce in a small bowl, and heat over hot water. Brown the butter in an omelet pan, and strain into first mixture. ¼ cup butter
This is a fragment of a browned-butter sauce, the kind served over broiled or poached fish. Only one quantity survives on the page — a quarter-cup of butter — so the rest has to be reasoned out from how the sauce works.
- The missing quantitiesNothing but the butter is measured here; the vinegar, lemon juice, salt and Worcestershire have lost their amounts in the printing. A sauce of this type traditionally runs about one part acid to two parts butter, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- "14 cup butter" is 1/4 cupThe fraction bar has dropped out in transcription. A quarter-cup is 4 tablespoons, 2 oz, about 57 g. The fragment gives no yield, so how many portions it dresses is guesswork.
- The hinge: how far to brownEverything depends on taking the butter to a true noisette — the foam subsides, the milk solids at the bottom turn hazelnut brown, and the smell turns nutty. A few seconds past that and it is acrid. Pull the pan off the heat while it is still a shade lighter than you want; it keeps cooking.
- Why it is strainedThe browned milk solids are what would burn or turn gritty in the finished sauce. Straining through a fine sieve leaves you the clear, nutty fat and none of the sediment.
- "Omelet pan"In this period the term generally meant a small, shallow, heavy pan with sloping sides; period cookbooks often advise keeping such a pan smooth and reserving it for delicate work. Any light-coloured skillet will do better today, because you can see the colour of the butter as it turns.
- Heat over hot waterA double boiler or a bowl set over simmering water. The acid mixture is only being warmed so the hot butter does not seize or spit when it goes in — do not let it approach a boil.
- ServingMake it at the last minute and spoon it over the fish as it goes to the table. It separates and dulls on standing, and reheating will not bring it back.
Browned butter sharpened with vinegar or lemon is one of the oldest fish sauces in the French repertoire — beurre noir when taken dark, beurre noisette when stopped at hazelnut, and classically paired with skate, brains or eggs. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) carried a whole battery of such sauces. The dash of Worcestershire here is the American signature. That bottled sauce, an anchovy-and-tamarind condiment sold in England from the later 1830s, had become a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century American pantry, and Boston-school cooks worked it into French formulas without apology.