No. 566

Melted Butter

Beurre Fondu

Set four ounces of butter in a saucepan, season it with salt, pepper, mignonette, and the juice of a lemon; let it melt sufficiently to liquify it, or else melt it thoroughly, and let it settle, pouring off the top carefully, refraining from disturbing the sediment at the bottom.

← No. 565 Black Butter Hot & Cold Butters No. 567 Hazel-Nut Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two preparations in one entry: butter barely melted and seasoned, or butter melted fully and clarified. Which one you want depends on what it is going on.

The hingeDecide before you start whether you are making a seasoned melted butter or a clarified one. For the first, take the pan off the heat while some solid butter remains and swirl until it liquefies, so the emulsion holds and stays creamy rather than splitting into oil and milky water.
MignonetteMignonette is coarsely cracked peppercorns, usually white, not a sauce. A few turns of a mill set coarse, or peppercorns crushed under a pan, gives the same effect.
QuantityFour ounces is one US stick, half a cup. Clarifying loses roughly a fifth to a quarter of the weight to water and milk solids, so expect somewhere around three to three and a quarter ounces of clear butter.
HeatKeep it low. Clarified butter wants a bare simmer just long enough for the foam to rise and the casein to drop; once the bubbling quietens and the liquid goes clear and golden, it is done. Any browning takes it towards beurre noisette, which may be what the following entry, No. 567 Hazel-Nut Butter, refers to.
Pouring off"Pouring off the top" means skimming the foam, then decanting the clear fat and leaving the white sediment behind. Letting the pan stand off the heat for a few minutes makes the separation cleaner; a ladle is steadier than tipping the pan.
Lemon and salt in the clarified versionSalt and lemon juice are water-based and will sink into the sediment you discard. Season the barely-melted version in the pan; season the clarified one after decanting, off the heat, and use it at once.
KeepingClarified butter, free of milk solids, holds for weeks covered in the refrigerator and takes a much higher frying heat than whole butter. The seasoned melted version does not keep and should be made to order.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working reference for a professional kitchen, which is why a whole section is given over to butters: a nineteenth-century restaurant treated them as a small library of finishes to be pulled out at service. Beurre fondu sits at the plainest end of that library, the sort of sauce poured over boiled fish, asparagus and artichokes when nothing richer was called for, and close kin to the drawn butter still served with shellfish. The instruction to melt gently and leave the sediment reflects the routine practice of clarifying butter, both to keep it sweet without refrigeration and to have a fat that would take frying heat without burning. Mignonette pepper was standard seasoning in French professional cookery of the period and turns up throughout the book.