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Anchovy Butter
This is very useful and can be used to spread on slips of toast as a relish, or may be employed in making anchovy sauce for fish, or be served in pats garnished with parsley. Clean bone and beat in a mortar to a paste one part of anchovies to two parts of fresh butter and add four ounces more butter. Pass through a sieve. Some cooks add spices and other finely-chopped parsley that has been scalded. Cayenne pepper and nutmeg may also be added to taste. Black or Brown Butter Place in a stewpan over the fire about half a pound of butter, leaving it there until it browns and then cool. In another pan put a teacupful of vinegar and a little pepper and boil until reduced one-third. When the butter is quite cold put in the pepper and vinegar and again warm it over the fire, stirring it well, but do not allow it to boil; when thoroughly mixed together, pour off into pots.
Two compound butters run together in one entry: an anchovy butter for canapés and sauces, and a beurre noir for fish. Both are straightforward once the vague quantities are pinned down.
- The ratio, as written"One part anchovies to two parts fresh butter" plus "four ounces more butter" is a proportion with an unspecified base. A workable reading is 2 oz anchovy fillets to 4 oz butter, then 4 oz more butter beaten in, giving roughly 2 oz fish to 8 oz butter. Start there and taste; anchovies vary enormously in salt.
- "Clean bone"This means salt-packed anchovies, sold whole in tins or by weight, which must be rinsed of their crust, split, and the spine lifted out. Oil-packed fillets are already boned and considerably less salty, so use them without rinsing and expect a milder butter.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but the sieve step is not optional if you want a smooth paste: fine bone and connective tissue survive the blade. Push the butter through a drum sieve or fine mesh with a stiff spatula while it is cool but pliable.
- Butter temperatureWork at soft-room-temperature, not melted. Melted butter separates and the emulsion will never come back together properly, leaving a greasy paste rather than a spreadable one.
- The scalded parsleyBlanching parsley for ten seconds and squeezing it dry sets the green and stops it bleeding grey into the butter. Chop it after blanching, not before.
- StorageRoll the finished butter in parchment into a cylinder and chill; it keeps about a week refrigerated and several months frozen, sliced into pats as needed. It is a butter with raw cured fish in it, not a preserve, so treat it as perishable.
- Black butter: how far to take itThe name points to butter taken genuinely dark, and the recipe says only to leave it until it browns. Many modern cooks stop nearer beurre noisette, deep hazelnut brown with a nutty smell, since past that the milk solids turn acrid. Pull the pan when the foam subsides and the solids are the colour of a walnut shell.
- A teacupful of vinegarPeriod teacups are usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz. Reduced by a third that leaves roughly 3 to 4 fl oz of sharp liquid for half a pound of butter, which is aggressive by modern taste; half that quantity suits most palates.
- Combining without breakingThe instruction to cool the butter fully, then rewarm gently with the vinegar and never boil, is the hinge of the second recipe. Hot butter meeting hot vinegar splits; a slow, stirred rewarming holds it together.
- YieldOn the reading at [0] the anchovy butter comes to about 10 oz. The black butter makes roughly half a pound.
Anchovy butter belongs to the French garde-manger repertoire of compound butters, already standard in American hotel kitchens by the time Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, presided there. The English fondness for anchovy as a background savour is older still and runs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ketchups, essences and Gentleman's Relish, so a butter of pounded salt anchovy would have read as familiar rather than exotic to a New York diner in 1896. Beurre noir, the second half of the entry, is generally traced to the classic French treatment of skate, where browned butter sharpened with vinegar and capers cuts the fish's richness; its appearance here without a named dish reflects the book's habit of cataloguing kitchen fundamentals for cooks expected to know where to deploy them.