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Black-Butter Sauce
Brown in a fryingpan an ounce of butter, adding six parsley leaves, heat again for a minute or so, and add five drops of vinegar or lemon juice to the pan; pour this also over, and serve.
This is beurre noir in its shortest possible form — a single-portion pan sauce meant to be poured over whatever dish preceded it in the book. A few of its measurements are best read as suggestions.
- The hinge: brown, not blackDespite the name, the butter should go to a deep nut-brown with a hazelnut smell, no further. Once the milk solids blacken the sauce turns acrid and cannot be rescued; pull the pan the moment the foam subsides and the specks at the bottom go the colour of strong tea.
- An ounce of butter2 tablespoons, enough to sauce one plate. For four servings work with 4 ounces (1 stick) and scale the parsley and acid to match.
- Five drops of vinegarGenuinely too little to taste. Most modern versions use rather more — on the order of a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice per ounce of butter — enough to cut the fat. Add it off the heat, with the pan tilted away, or it will spit.
- Frying panUse a light-coloured pan — stainless or tinned copper. In black cast iron you cannot see the colour change, which is the only thing this sauce asks you to judge.
- Dry the parsleyWet parsley in hot butter erupts. Blot the leaves thoroughly; a minute in the fat should leave them crisp and dark green, not limp.
- Serve immediatelyBrowned butter continues to darken in a warm pan and separates as it sits. Make it while the dish it dresses is going to the table.
- What it goes onThe "pour this also over" appears to refer back to a dish given earlier in the book. Classically the sauce belongs to skate, calf's brains, poached eggs and boiled cauliflower or salsify.
Beurre noir — black butter — is one of the small French pan sauces that carried over into American hotel cooking almost unchanged, and its most famous partner is skate: raie au beurre noir was a fixture of Paris restaurants and appears in the French repertory through the nineteenth century. The other traditional vehicle is calf's brains. The name is generally read as an exaggeration rather than an instruction; the closely related beurre noisette, "hazelnut butter," describes the actual target colour more honestly, and the two terms have often been used loosely for the same thing.