No. 582

Montpellier Butter

Beurre Montpellier

Pick, wash, and blanch one pound of chervil, chives, tarragon, pimpernel, and water-cress; drain and refresh them, then press them well to extract all the water, and pound them in a mortar with six hard boiled egg-yolks, six well washed anchovies, five ounces of pickled gherkins, five ounces of dry capers, and add salt, pepper, and a piece of garlic the size of a pea; pound all together and rub the whole through a fine sieve, and when it has all passed, put two pounds of butter into the mortar, add the strained ravigote, two tablespoonfuls of oil, and one of tarragon vinegar; and mix it all thoroughly together. Montpellier butter should be a pretty, light green color.

← No. 581 Maitre d'Hotel Butter Hot & Cold Butters No. 583 Ravigote or Green Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French compound butter, built as a paste of blanched green herbs, egg yolk, anchovy and pickles beaten into butter. Ranhofer's quantities are restaurant-scale; everything else translates directly.

Yield and scalingTwo pounds of butter plus a pound of herbs makes roughly three and a half pounds of finished butter — enough to coat a banquet's worth of cold salmon. Quarter the recipe for home use and it still fills a large log.
The herbs"Pimpernel" here is salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), not scarlet pimpernel; if you cannot find it, add more chervil and watercress. The pound is picked leaves and tender tips, weighed before blanching; Ranhofer does not say how it is divided among the five.
Blanch and refreshThirty to sixty seconds in well-salted boiling water, then straight into ice water. This is what fixes the color; longer and the green turns olive. Squeeze the herbs genuinely dry in a towel — residual water makes the butter break.
AnchoviesThe instruction to wash them suggests salt-packed anchovies, which need rinsing and boning. Oil-packed anchovies can be used as they are; whether Ranhofer's six means six whole fish or six fillets is not stated.
Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute, but still push the herb paste through a fine sieve or tamis before adding the butter — the fibrous stems of tarragon and watercress will otherwise leave the butter stringy.
"Strained ravigote"That phrase refers to the sieved herb-and-anchovy paste just made, not to a separate sauce from elsewhere in the book.
Oil and vinegarPresumably olive oil, though the recipe says only "oil." Add the vinegar last and taste before salting: anchovies, capers and gherkins together carry a great deal of salt already.
TemperatureThe butter must be properly soft, near 65F, or it will not take the wet herb paste smoothly. Work it cool, not melted, or the emulsion separates and the color streaks.
Serving and keepingTraditionally spread or piped over cold poached fish, or rolled into a log and sliced onto grilled meat. It keeps about five days refrigerated and freezes well; the green fades after a day or two.

A Little History

Montpellier butter is generally said to take its name from the southern French city, though the connection is not documented, and is generally traced to the classical repertoire of the early nineteenth century, where it belonged to the cold larder rather than the stove — the province of the garde-manger, who dressed poached salmon, trout and cold fowl for the buffet. Its logic is the same as sauce ravigote and sauce verte: blanched soft herbs pounded to a paste, sharpened with anchovy, caper and pickle, then carried in a fat. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), grouped it with maître d'hôtel and other compound butters because in a professional kitchen these were made in bulk and held ready, to be sliced, piped or spread the moment a dish went out. The insistence that it be "a pretty, light green color" is a reminder that these butters were as much decoration as seasoning — a cold salmon masked in pale green butter was a centerpiece before it was a meal.