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Parsley Butter
Beat three tablespoons of butter to a cream, and then add one tablespoon of lemon juice, one of chopped parsley, one-half teaspoon of salt, and one-eighth teaspoon of pepper. Beat these ingredients into the butter, and it will be ready for use. It is nice to spread upon fried or boiled fish, and also over potato balls. When intended for the latter, however, one-half tablespoon of lemon juice will be enough.
A compound butter of the plainest kind, and nothing about it has aged badly. The only points worth making concern texture, quantity and keeping.
- Butter temperature"Beat to a cream" means properly softened butter at cool room temperature, not melted. If it slumps or looks oily, the lemon juice will not work into it and you will get a weeping, grainy paste.
- Adding the lemon juiceAdd it a little at a time and beat between additions. Three tablespoons of butter will take a full tablespoon of juice, but only if it goes in gradually.
- SaltThe recipe does not say whether the butter is salted. If yours is, start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; chop it fine and make sure it is dry, since wet parsley thins the butter. Fold it in at the end rather than beating it hard, which bruises it and tints the butter green.
- YieldAbout two ounces, enough to dress four fish fillets or a bowl of potatoes.
- Shaping and keepingRoll in parchment into a log, chill until firm, and cut coins to lay on hot fish. It keeps a week refrigerated and three months frozen; the parsley darkens after a day or two but the flavour holds.
- Potato ballsThe reduction to half a tablespoon of lemon for potatoes is sound; the full quantity reads sharp against them.
Compound butters belong to the French repertoire that American cookbooks absorbed steadily through the second half of the nineteenth century, and this one is essentially beurre maître d'hôtel under a plainer name: butter, lemon, parsley, salt, pepper. It was a standard preparation well before Escoffier, who recorded rather than originated it, and it remains the standard finish for grilled fish and steak. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in that spirit of tidy domestic instruction, and a recipe like this shows the logic clearly: one preparation, made in a minute, that dresses fried fish, boiled fish and potatoes alike without the household needing to keep a stock or a roux on hand. The note about cutting the lemon juice for potatoes is the sort of practical adjustment that distinguishes a working kitchen book from a copied one.