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Anchovy Butter
Place in a bowl three-quarters ounce butter, adding one tablespoon anchovy sauce and the strained juice of one-quarter of a sound lemon. Mix well together and keep in a cool place for general use.
A compound butter of the kind kept on hand in a professional kitchen to finish grilled fish, steaks and toast. The proportions as printed are unusually lean on butter, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The butter quantity looks wrongThe butter quantity looks lean -- Three-quarters of an ounce is about a tablespoon and a half of butter, which a full tablespoon of anchovy sauce plus lemon juice will slacken into a loose paste rather than a firm spreadable butter. If you want something that can be chilled and sliced, scale the butter up against the sauce rather than following the printed ratio, unless you want it aggressively salty and soft.
- Anchovy sauce is not fish sauceThe bottled anchovy sauce of the era was a spiced, vinegared anchovy condiment, pourable rather than a paste, and nothing like Southeast Asian nam pla. Anchovy paste from a tube is the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf, though it is stiffer; two or three oil-packed fillets mashed to a pulp will also do.
- Start with soft butterThe butter must be at room temperature and worked smooth before anything goes in, or the lemon juice will bead out and the mixture will separate. Cream it with a fork or a small spatula first, then beat in the sauce, then the juice a little at a time.
- Strain the lemon juice, and taste before saltingThe instruction to strain is not fussiness -- pips and pulp spoil the texture of a butter meant to be sliced or piped. Add no salt until you have tasted; anchovy sauce and paste are both heavily salted already.
- "A cool place" means the refrigerator"A cool place" means a larder or icebox; a refrigerator is the modern equivalent -- Roll the finished butter in parchment into a cylinder and chill until firm, then cut coins as needed. Keep it refrigerated and use it while fresh.
- Yield and useAs printed the recipe makes only about a tablespoon and a half, enough for a portion or two; a quarter pound scaled up gives roughly 8 to 10 slices. Drop a coin on a grilled steak, a fillet of sole or a lamb chop just before serving, or spread it thin on toast under poached eggs.
Anchovy sauce was a fixture of the Anglo-American store cupboard from the eighteenth century onward, sold bottled alongside mushroom ketchup, and used as much for colouring and salting sauces as for its own flavour. Compound butters -- beurres composés -- came into English and American cookery through French professional practice, where a brigade would keep several kinds worked up and chilled so that a plate could be finished in seconds; Escoffier's contemporaries list dozens, among them anchovy, maitre d'hôtel and ravigote. Its place in a section called The World's Kitchen reflects how thoroughly this French technique had been absorbed by early twentieth-century American cookbooks.