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Burnt Butter for Fish or Eggs
Miss Beaty.
Heat two ounces of butter in a frying-pan till a dark brown, then add a tablespoonful of vinegar, half a teaspoonful of salt, and half a dozen shakes from the pepperbox.
This is beurre noir in three lines: brown the butter hard, then acidulate it. The whole recipe hinges on how far you take the butter and how fast you get the vinegar in.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. The tablespoon of vinegar is roughly 15 ml; cider or white wine vinegar suits fish better than distilled. "Half a dozen shakes from the pepperbox" is about a quarter teaspoon of ground black pepper, adjusted to taste.
- Dark brown, not blackDespite the name, you want the milk solids toasted to the colour of a hazelnut shell and smelling nutty, not acrid. Butter goes from browned to burnt in well under a minute; pull the pan off the heat as soon as the colour arrives, since the residual heat keeps the browning going.
- Clarify first if you canMelting the butter and skimming the foam before browning gives you more control, because you are then toasting the solids in a clear fat rather than guessing through a layer of froth. Not essential, but it makes the colour readable.
- Adding the vinegarVinegar hitting hot fat spatters and throws sharp-smelling steam. Stand back, add it off the heat, and swirl rather than stir. Return to the heat for a few seconds only if you want it to thicken slightly.
- Pan choiceUse a light-coloured pan, stainless or tinned, so you can judge the browning. In a black cast-iron skillet you are working blind, and cast iron also holds enough heat to carry the butter past the point you wanted.
- Yield and servingEnough for two to four portions of fish or four poached eggs. Spoon it over at the table while still foaming; it dulls and separates as it cools, so make it last, not first.
- Traditional additionsFrench practice commonly finishes the same sauce with capers, chopped parsley, or both, added with the vinegar. Miss Beaty's version is the plain one, without them.
Browned butter sharpened with vinegar is the French beurre noir, long attached to skate and to eggs, and it travelled into English and American household books as "burnt butter" — a literal rendering of a name that overstates the case, since properly made it is brown rather than black. Its appeal in a nineteenth-century kitchen was economy of means: few ingredients, all of them already on the shelf, no stock, no thickening, and little time on the stove. Community-compiled cookbooks of the period routinely credit recipes to named contributors in exactly this way, so "Miss Beaty" was presumably a local cook whose recipe was collected; the brevity suggests notes traded between people who already knew how butter behaves in a pan.