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Sweet-Pepper Butter
Place four Spanish sweet peppers in a mortar, pound to a pulp, remove and press through sieve into a bowl, add a half ounce good butter, sharply mix and use as required.
A compound butter of the old garde-manger type, written in the telegraphic style of professional kitchen notes. Two things need settling before you start: how wet the pepper pulp is, and how much butter you actually want.
- The ratio is almost certainly a misprint or a shorthandThe ratio is startling as printed -- half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon, which the pulp of four peppers would swamp into a loose sauce rather than a butter. It may be shorthand, or the butter may simply be there to bind a small flavouring paste. If you want something that sets and slices, you will need considerably more butter, on the order of 4-8 oz for four peppers' worth of pulp.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos: squat, thick-walled, deep red and much sweeter than a bell pepper. Jarred whole pimientos are the closest common substitute and are already peeled and cooked, which saves the sieving step. Fresh red bell pepper works but is thinner in flavour.
- Roast and peel firstThe recipe does not say whether the peppers are raw or cooked, and the sieving step suggests skin is being strained out. Blistering the peppers over flame or under a broiler, then peeling, gives a sweeter, less grassy pulp and makes the sieve almost unnecessary.
- Water is the enemyThis is the hinge. Pepper pulp is mostly water, and water will not stay in butter. Cook the sieved pulp down in a dry pan until it is a thick paste and no liquid weeps out, then cool it completely before mixing, or the butter will break and bead.
- Mortar, or notA small food processor does the pounding in seconds; a blender is too large for this quantity. "Sharply mix" means beating the paste into softened, not melted, butter until the colour is even.text
- TextButter temperature -- butter at about 65F takes the pulp readily; melted butter will separate as it cools.
- Yield and keepingFour peppers plus half a pound of butter gives roughly a cup and a half (the butter alone is a cup). Roll it in parchment into a log, chill firm, and slice coins as needed; it keeps about a week refrigerated and freezes for a few months.
- How it was used"as required" is left open, but a compound butter of this kind was typically a finish: a slice melted over grilled fish, steak or chicken, whisked into a pan sauce off the heat, or piped onto canapes for colour.
Compound butters were a fixed part of the professional repertoire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a kitchen kept a row of them in the cold room and finished dishes by dropping a coin of flavoured butter on at the last moment. The Spanish sweet pepper, or pimiento, arrived in that repertoire relatively late; it is generally traced to Spanish cultivation of New World capsicums, and Spanish canned pimientos were an import novelty in late-nineteenth-century America, with large-scale US production only getting going in the 1910s. Its appeal here is as much visual as gustatory, since the pulp turns butter a strong coral pink, which is why recipes of this era so often deploy it on canapés. The mortar and sieve are the tell of the period: before mechanical purée-making, any smooth vegetable paste meant pounding and pushing through a tammy or hair sieve by hand.