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Montpelier Butter
Take two ounces each of fresh chervil, tarragon, burnet, chives and garden cress or pepper grass, yolks of two hard boiled eggs, two anchovies, one-half of an ounce each of pickled cucumbers and capers, one-quarter of a small clove of garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Drop the herbs into boiling water and scald for two minutes, then drain and dry in a cloth. Wring the pickles in a cloth to extract the vinegar; pound all the above ingredients to a paste in a mortar and rub through a fine sieve. Wash and dry the mortar, put in it one-half of a pound of butter, gradually incorporate the herbs with one tablespoonful of olive oil and one-half of a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar. If not a good green color, add the juice of some pounded spinach. Pack in jars, cover tightly and keep in a cool place.
This is beurre de Montpellier, a cold compound butter from the classical French larder, and it survives essentially unchanged in modern garde-manger work. The recipe is straightforward; the details that need translating are the herbs, the equipment and the storage.
- The hinge: shock the herbsThe hinge: cool the herbs fast -- The two-minute scald brightens the green, but the herbs are best cooled quickly and then squeezed bone dry; left to cool slowly in their own heat they tend toward olive-drab. The recipe offers spinach juice as a colour rescue if the green fails. Wet herbs will also break the butter.
- Herbs you may have to substituteChervil and tarragon are still sold; salad burnet and garden cress (pepper grass) are rarely in shops. Watercress or young arugula stands in for the cress, and a little flat parsley plus extra chervil covers the burnet. Two ounces each is a large bunch — several handfuls of leaves per herb — presumably weighed before blanching.
- AnchoviesTwo anchovies in a recipe of this vintage most likely means two whole salt-packed fish, roughly four modern oil-packed fillets. Rinse salted ones and lift the fillets from the bone.
- Pickled cucumbersRead this as cornichons or a sour dill, not sweet gherkins. Half an ounce is about one or two small cornichons; the wringing step matters because free vinegar will make the butter separate.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the whole job: pulse the drained herbs, egg yolks, anchovy, pickles, capers and garlic to a paste, then add cold-but-pliable butter in pieces and finally the oil and vinegar. Keep everything cool so the butter stays emulsified rather than melting.
- Yield and useHalf a pound of butter plus the flavourings gives roughly a pound of finished paste, enough for a dozen servings. It is a coating and finishing butter: spread on cold poached salmon or trout, piped onto canapés, or set under grilled steak.
- Storage"A cool place" meant a larder in 1900. With egg yolk and anchovy in it this is a perishable butter: refrigerate and use within about five days, or roll it in parchment and freeze for a couple of months.
- GarlicA quarter of a small clove is deliberate restraint, not timidity. The butter is meant to taste of green herbs and tarragon vinegar, with the garlic and anchovy sitting underneath as background salt.
Montpelier butter is the American spelling of beurre de Montpellier, one of the standard cold sauces of the nineteenth-century French kitchen, generally traced to the professional garde-manger — the cold-larder station responsible for buffet work, aspics and decorated cold fish. Its name is usually attributed to the city of Montpellier in Languedoc, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Its classic job was to mask a cold poached salmon in a smooth green coat, which explains the recipe's anxiety about colour and the fallback of pounded spinach, a trick borrowed from the green butters used to tint sauces. That a compound butter of this complexity turns up in an American household compendium under "Miscellaneous" shows how far the vocabulary of French restaurant cooking had spread into English-language domestic manuals by 1900 — printed in full, herb list and mortar and all, for a cook who was expected to own neither a professional larder nor much chervil.