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Orange Butter
Boil twelve eggs until hard, peel, cut them into halves, and put their yolks in a mortar with two ounces of sugar, four ounces of butter, and two ounces of blanched and chopped sweet almonds; pound the whole to a smooth paste, moistening it occasionally with orange-flower water, then rub it through a sieve onto a glass dish. Serve the butter with any kind of sweet or fancy biscuits.
A compound sweet paste in the old sense of "butter" — nothing is churned, and despite the name there is no orange in it. Everything depends on the yolks being fully dry and the paste being pushed through a sieve at the end.
- No orangesThe flavour comes entirely from orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom and sold in Middle Eastern and baking shops. It is potent: start with a teaspoon, work it in, and add more only as needed to loosen the paste. Too much turns the mixture soapy and perfumed.
- Weights, not volumesThe ounces are avoirdupois weight. Two ounces sugar is about 1/4 cup, four ounces butter is one stick (113 g), two ounces almonds roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup whole before chopping. Twelve yolks weigh around 7 oz, making them the largest single component and the paste very rich.
- Hard-boil properly, then dry the yolksAny moisture or greenish sulphur ring will show in the finished paste. Cook the eggs through, cool completely, and let the yolks air a few minutes before pounding; damp yolks make a sticky mass that will not sieve cleanly.
- Butter temperatureSoftened, not melted, or the paste will separate as it cools. If it does look oily, chill it briefly and pound again.
- Mortar or machineA food processor will do the pounding, but pulse the almonds with the sugar first so they grind rather than turn to paste, then add yolks and butter. The mortar gives a finer, less pasty result if you have the patience.
- The sieve is the pointRubbing the paste through a medium sieve directly onto the serving dish produces fine strands that fall in a light heap — that is the presentation. Do not stir or smooth them afterwards, or you have merely made a lump of egg butter.
- Blanched almonds"Sweet" almonds simply means ordinary edible almonds, as distinct from bitter almonds, which were also sold then. Blanch and skin them yourself or buy them blanched; the skins would speckle the pale paste.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, enough for a dozen people with biscuits. It is cooked egg and butter, so keep it covered and refrigerated and use within two days; let it stand at room temperature briefly before serving so it is not stiff.
"Butter" here belongs to the older kitchen vocabulary in which the word meant any smooth pounded paste bound with butter — anchovy butter, lobster butter, almond butter — rather than a churned dairy product, and the sweet versions were a standard part of the nineteenth-century dessert table alongside fancy biscuits. Orange-flower water, distilled from the blossom of the bitter orange, is often said to have been among the characteristic floral flavourings of European confectionery from around the seventeenth century onward, and it seems to have kept that place in some kitchens long after vanilla had begun to displace it elsewhere. Hard-boiled yolks pounded with sugar and nuts are an old confectioner's trick: the yolk carries fat and sets the texture without cooking, and similar egg-yolk sweets run through Iberian, Italian and French pastry traditions. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection, gathered from the Waldorf's kitchens, reflects a house style still firmly rooted in the French repertoire of the preceding generation.