For the Modern Kitchen
A compound butter from Ranhofer's repertoire of finishing butters, meant to be worked smooth, chilled, and sliced onto grilled meat or fish, or stirred into a sauce at the last moment. The quantities as printed are a sketch rather than a formula, and the three peppers are alternatives as much as a blend.
- Read the pepper list as optionsThe phrasing offers cayenne or chili, plus paprika. A full teaspoon of cayenne in half a pound of butter is aggressive; start with a quarter teaspoon and taste, since the heat of ground cayenne varies from jar to jar.
- Half a pound of butterTwo American sticks, 8 oz or 225 g. Take it to true room temperature before working, not softened in a microwave, or the butter will break and weep when it chills.
- Hungary paprikaSweet Hungarian paprika rather than smoked Spanish pimentón; nothing in the recipe calls for smoke. Buy it recently; paprika loses both colour and aroma within a few months and stale paprika turns the butter dull brown rather than red.
- Sweet Spanish pimentosWhole roasted, peeled red peppers, the same thing sold today jarred as pimientos. Drain them thoroughly and chop or sieve to a paste, or the water will keep the butter from setting firm.
- Salt and lemonNo amounts are given. For 8 oz of butter, roughly half a teaspoon of fine salt and a teaspoon of lemon juice is in the right register. Add the juice a few drops at a time while beating so it emulsifies instead of pooling.
- Bloom the dry peppersCayenne and paprika are both fat-soluble in their colour and much of their flavour. Warming them briefly in a spoonful of the butter before beating in the rest gives a deeper red and a rounder taste than stirring the raw powder through.
- Shaping and keepingRoll in parchment into a cylinder and chill until firm, then cut coins as needed. It keeps a week refrigerated and freezes for three months; the paprika colour fades first.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to finish twelve to sixteen portions of grilled steak, chicken or fish.
A Little HistoryCharles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, gave The Epicurean (1894) an entire short section of hot and cold butters, the workhorse garnishes of a nineteenth-century professional kitchen: anchovy, crayfish, montpellier, ma"itre d'hôtel, and this one. A pat of seasoned butter melting over a grilled entrée did the work a modern kitchen might give to a pan sauce, and it could be made in quantity in the morning and held cold all service. The specific interest here is the paprika. Ranhofer names it as "Hungary paprika," a foreign ingredient identified by its origin; it is generally traced to Hungary's adoption of American capsicums by way of the Ottoman Balkans. Lumping it in one recipe with cayenne, chili and Spanish pimiento shows a chef treating the whole capsicum family as a single palette of heat and colour.