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Garlic Butter Sauce
Peel and boil a couple of garlics as for "Garlic Flavoring for Gravies," drain, pound them to a paste in a mortar together with one ounce of butter, one saltspoonful of salt and half a saltspoonful of pepper; rub the mass through a fine hair-sieve, mix with it one breakfast cupful of butter warmed to melting and the strained juice of a lemon. It is then ready for use.
A compound butter sauce of the old hotel type: boiled garlic pounded smooth, then loosened with melted butter and lemon. The whole point is a garlic flavor with no rawness or heat in it.
- "A couple of garlics"Period usage is ambiguous: "a garlic" can mean a whole head, though "peel and boil" may equally point to cloves. If read as two heads the quantity looks enormous, but boiling takes out much of the pungency.
- Boil first, and change the waterBoil first -- The cross-reference is to the author's "Garlic Flavoring for Gravies." Boiling softens the garlic and takes out the sulfurous bite that would otherwise dominate a butter sauce.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper for the initial paste — you will season again at the end, once the full quantity of butter is in.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup runs larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Call it two sticks of butter, or a little more, against the single ounce already worked into the paste.
- "Warmed to melting" is the hingeBarely melted, not hot and not boiled. Butter warmed only to the point of melting pours creamy; heated harder it separates into oil and milky sediment.
- The hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was the standard tool for pressing purées without a metallic taste. A fine-mesh strainer and the back of a ladle does the same job; so does a blender, though the mortar gives a smoother, less aerated paste.
- Lemon last, off the heatLemon last -- Strain the juice as directed; pips and pulp will otherwise sit in the sauce. One lemon to roughly a cupful of butter is a fairly sharp finish, so taste before adding all of it.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a half. It is a pouring sauce for grilled steak, lamb chops, snails or broiled fish; being melted butter it is liable to separate on standing, so serve it barely warm and soon after making.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf, and his 1896 book is essentially a working reference for a hotel kitchen where French sauce practice was the house language. This is a beurre composé in that tradition — a flavoring pounded to a paste, sieved, and let down with soft butter and acid, the same method behind maître d'hôtel butter and the various herb butters that fill the surrounding pages. The boiling step is worth noting: garlic was still regarded with some suspicion in American hotel dining of the 1890s, associated with immigrant and southern European cooking, and it is often said that cooks of the era preferred to blanch it or merely rub a cut clove around the bowl rather than serve it outright. Oscar's sauce tames the garlic thoroughly first — garlic flavor for diners who would not have ordered garlic.