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Butters of Various Kinds
In making butters of various kinds for sandwiches, first rub the butter to a cream then blend with it the flavor the butter to a cream then blend with it the flavor wanted. Caviar, anchovy, sardine, cheese, lobster, parsley, chives, cress, chutny chill, horseradish, are all used. A few olives, stoned and minced very fine, are an addition to anchovy sandwiches. Dates or figs chopped very fine and moistened with hot water and lemon juice may be spread on thin slices of bread and sprinkled with finely chopped nuts. These make delicious sandwiches, Finely minced ginger may be sprinkled on Neufchatel cheese which has been moistened with a little butter or which has been moistened with a little butter or rich cream and spread on buttered slices of bread.
This is a method rather than a fixed formula: soften butter, beat it smooth, then work in a flavouring. The proportions are left to the cook, which is workable once you know the usual ratio.
- The hinge: temperature, not force"Rub to a cream" means butter at cool room temperature, soft enough to work but not oily, beaten until smooth and lightened. Butter that has been melted or microwaved will separate and the finished spread can weep on the bread.
- A working ratioThe book gives none. For strong flavourings — anchovy, caviar, chutney, horseradish — start at 1 to 2 teaspoons per 4 oz (1 stick) of butter and taste. For herbs, cress and chives, 2 to 3 tablespoons chopped fine per stick is about right.
- Anchovy and sardineMash the fillets to a smooth paste before adding; any fibre left whole will tear thin bread. Anchovies carry enough salt that the butter should be unsalted, or the sandwich becomes inedible.
- "Chutny chill"Apparently a garbled setting of chutney and chilli. Chutney of this period was often the sweet, spiced mango type; chop the fruit fine or the butter will not spread.
- NeufchatelIf this is an American book, the name here will mean the soft, fresh, unripened cheese sold under it in the United States — closer to a lower-fat cream cheese than to the bloomy-rinded French Neufchâtel. Either works; the French version is tangier and softer.
- Text duplicationSeveral phrases are set twice in the original — "the butter to a cream then blend with it the flavor" and "which has been moistened with a little butter or". These are compositor's errors, not repeated steps.
- Keeping and slicingRoll a finished butter in parchment into a log and chill; it slices cleanly and keeps a week refrigerated, three months frozen. Bring it back to spreading temperature before it meets the bread, or the crumb tears.
- The date and fig spreadSoftening the dried fruit in hot water with lemon juice makes a paste, not a butter — it contains no butter at all. Use it on bread already buttered, as the book implies for the ginger and cheese version.
Compound butters belong to the tea table, and are often associated with a period when the sandwich is said to have shifted from a substantial travelling food to something thin, crustless and served in quantity at afternoon receptions. The technique is straight out of professional French practice ois, beurre de crevettes and their relatives were standard garde-manger preparations, used to finish sauces and dress grilled meat hem onto the domestic bread-and-butter plate. The ingredient list here reads as a small map of what an American middle-class kitchen could buy in tins and jars: caviar, anchovy, sardine, lobster and Indian chutney all arrived preserved and shelf-stable, while the cress, chives and parsley came from the garden. Neufchatel, made in New York State from the 1870s onward, was a familiar grocery item rather than an import, and its pairing with minced preserved ginger is characteristic of the period's fondness for a sweet-hot note on a bland base.