Milk (46 page)
Authors: Anne Mendelson
A
s you saw if you put butter in a closed container with onion as suggested on
this page
, it’s a magnet for penetrating smells and flavors. Merely “cutting the butter with an oniony knife” was the thoroughly English proposal for getting rid of an unwelcome visitor in one of
Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” children’s books. Of course, there are those of us who
like
raw onion or other assertive, aromatic ingredients just begging to pair up with some of the highly sensitive and reactive chemical components of butter. This affinity is part of the reason that even uncooked butter can be one of the most magical sauces, or sauce bases, in the canon.
Cooked butter can play a similar role when heated with desired ingredients long enough to become infused with their essence. Anglophiles may think of shellfish butter made by simmering the crushed shells of shrimp or lobster in butter, or potted savories in which gently melted butter is poured over a rillette-like mixture of shredded long-simmered meat. I’m a fan of the quite different approach represented by the Ethiopian spiced butter, nit’r kibeh (
this page
). But uncooked flavored butters are both easier to produce and much more diverse.
In this large tribe of savory toppings, spreads, and quasi-sauces, the butter is worked with some chosen flavor foil until thoroughly combined. Such mixtures, often called “compound butters,” belong to the fill-in-the-blank category of recipes that really amount to no more than “Take some butter and mix it with some (insert name) to suit your taste.” The partnering ingredients can be in any kind of ground, puréed, mashed, grated, finely minced, or liquid form that permits even distribution.
For practice purposes, try making up a small amount as follows: Put about ¼ cup of butter in a mixing bowl and let it warm to the temperature of a cool room. (It can be salted or unsalted, but the latter is better if you’ll be adding a salty ingredient.) When it’s just soft enough to work with, before it
turns greasy and squishy, cream it with a stout wooden spoon and work in about 1 teaspoon of freshly minced chives. Taste it and add more chives if desired. Refrigerate it, covered, until dinnertime. Let it come to room temperature and serve with baked potatoes.
That’s really all there is to it, though you’ll usually deal with larger amounts. One caveat: When you mix perishable raw aromatics into butter, the insulating fat provides nice growth conditions for anaerobic bacteria, so you should plan on using (or freezing) the mixture within twenty-four hours. Dried spices and most things that have been cooked or pickled present no problem.
The following list of flavoring suggestions is far from exhaustive. The sky’s the limit, but simplicity is better than overkill. Note that a little freshly squeezed lemon juice will pep up many butter-herb combinations. Usually I like to keep to fairly Eurocentric ingredients, though I have to say that minced Chinese salted black beans make a great flavored butter. I prefer to work with ½ to 1 cup of butter, depending on the destined use.
Judgment calls on how much or little of a flavoring ingredient to use are difficult. Always start with a small amount and add more to taste. The amounts given here are minimums, meant to be enlarged at your own discretion.
• Minced or grated raw onion (red, yellow, white); finely minced raw or blanched garlic; finely minced scallion (whites, greens, or both). Start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter; use within a day.
• Good meat glaze (beef or veal). With a dash of lemon juice, this is the most luxurious thing you can put on poached fish or asparagus. Start with 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Balsamic or other preferred vinegar; start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Any preferred fresh herb or combination of herbs, such as parsley, oregano, chives, cilantro, rosemary (sparingly), basil,
shiso,
tarragon, minced very fine. Start with 2 teaspoons or less per half cup of butter; use within a day.
• Any preferred dried ground spice or spice mixture, especially “savory” or versatile “sweet-savory” spices such as cumin, paprika or ground red pepper (Hungarian or Turkish),
Spanish smoked paprika, black or white pepper, cardamom, allspice, garam masala, curry powder, various homemade dry spice rubs. Start with ½ to 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Minced or puréed fresh chiles, canned chipotles, roasted sweet red peppers. Start with ½ to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter, more for sweet peppers.
• Prepared mustard,
harissa,
sun-dried tomato paste, anchovy paste, hot pepper sauces, miscellaneous herb-based seasoning pastes meant as rubs or marinades for grilled foods. Start with ½ to 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Minced anchovies or anchovy paste, sardines (sparingly), smoked ham or prosciutto, smoked salmon, salmon “caviar.” Start with ½ teaspoon per half cup of butter for anchovies, 1 to 2 teaspoons for the rest.
• Pesto or fresh Mexican salsa, minced dill pickles or other pickled vegetables, minced capers. Start with 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Freshly ground pistachios or other nuts. Start with 2 to 3 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Finely grated lemon or other citrus rind. Start with ½ teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Finely grated aged cheese (e.g., Parmesan, aged Gouda). Start with 2 to 3 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
W
hat happens if you half-melt butter while combining it with a small amount of some water-based liquid such as vinegar, white wine, or lemon juice? You get a fragile emulsion, pale and opaque, that makes the best of all sauces for fish (especially pike or shad), poached shellfish, and some vegetables (especially artichokes, asparagus, or leeks). From the miracle of butter chemistry as described earlier, you know that the unique manner in which warmed butter gradually changes from solid to liquid is a heaven-sent gift to cooks, a subtle
transition that can be stopped at different points for certain purposes. At about 125° or 130°F the
balance of barely solid and fully liquid components creates the richly satiny but ethereal effect synonymous with a proper beurre blanc. Not surprisingly, it can’t be held for more than minutes and does not bear reheating.
The idea is quite old. The sauce for “buttered eggs” (hard-boiled and sliced) in
John Murrell’s 1621
A Booke of Cookerie
is “sweet butter drawne thicke with faire water.” Something like this was the usual “drawn butter” or “melted butter” of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks, but by then it had become standard practice to hedge the bet by adding a little flour to stabilize the mixture at a higher temperature. (In fact, in some cookbooks “drawn butter” later was degraded into a
roux thinned with water.) The flourless
French beurre blanc in the style of Anjou became familiar to American cooks only about a generation ago. The splendid food writer
Sheila Hibben was already presenting a flourless “white butter” as a New Orleans fish sauce in
The National Cook Book
in 1932, but I don’t know of any Angevin-type “white butter” in a major all-purpose American kitchen bible before the 1962
Joy of Cooking.
The sauce is not at all tricky. It is both better-flavored and more stable if made with a dash of acid, which usually comes from boiling down a little vinegar, dry white wine, or a combination to a few tablespoons. You then start beating the butter into the hot liquid a little at a time. Adding the fat faster won’t ruin the sauce as with mayonnaise; it just makes the deliberately incomplete melting process slightly harder to supervise. What you want is to keep the butter continually starting to
melt
without starting to
cook.
If fully liquefied, it will break the emulsion and turn a velvety sauce into grease, albeit good-tasting grease. (If this happens on your first try, say nothing and serve it anyhow—just remember where things went wrong for next time.) Have the food piping hot when you pour the sauce over it.
The proportions of wine and vinegar can be altered to taste—1 to 1 as given here, or 2 or even 3 parts wine to 1 of vinegar. Some people add a tablespoon of heavy cream to the reduction before starting to add the butter, on the theory that it stabilizes the emulsion, but it isn’t really necessary. Nor do you have to strain the sauce before serving. The bits of shallot accentuate the flavor.
YIELD:
1 cup
½ pound (2 sticks) butter, preferably unsalted and made from cultured cream
1 medium shallot
¼ cup white wine vinegar
¼ cup dry white wine (Muscadet is traditional)
¼ to ½ teaspoon salt (omit if using salted butter)
Cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces, and keep it cold.
Mince the shallot very fine. Bring the vinegar and wine to a boil in a small heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add the shallot and simmer over medium heat, not letting the edges scorch, until only 1 to 2 tablespoons of liquid are left. (If the liquid evaporates completely, add 1 to 2 tablespoons water.)
Remove the pan from the heat, let stand for a minute or two, and beat in 1 to 2 tablespoons of cold butter with a wooden spoon or wire whisk. When it is almost completely melted, return the pan to the stove, either keeping the heat very low or being prepared to snatch it off the burner. Begin vigorously beating or whisking in the rest of the butter, 1 or 2 tablespoons at a time; the sauce will thicken and turn pale as you proceed. Keep watching the consistency; the sauce should never become fully liquefied. If the butter seems to be melting too fast, quickly remove the pan from the heat and set it in a larger saucepan of cold water before proceeding. Add the salt (if using) just before the last few tablespoons of butter. Whisk the sauce for a few seconds off the heat, and serve at once.
VARIATIONS:
For Beurre Rouge, replace the white wine with red wine. You can also use lemon juice (for Beurre Citronné).
(“BLACK BUTTER”/“BROWN BUTTER”)
P
robably everyone who has cooked with butter has burned it on at least one occasion. In fact, you can learn a lot about the chemistry of butter by following the process to the smelly and bitter end. But if you break off shortly before the smoke-alarm stage, the result is one of the simplest and best butter sauces. It’s something like the early steps of making either
clarified butter or ghee, where you sacrifice the creamy lusciousness of barely melted butter for other effects.
The heavenly butteriness of butter, you will remember, rests on the wheels-within-wheels circumstances of its composition: a complex emulsion of compounds with many different melting points, holding tiny droplets of water-based true
buttermilk that in turn contain various suspended milk solids. Above a temperature of 212°F any water starts boiling off. In unclarified butter the solid particles remain in the hot fat, where they would eventually darken and burn if allowed to get much hotter than 250°F. But before this happens, some of the melted milkfat lipids become hot enough to volatilize, or escape as gases that release a hazelnutlike fragrance (hence the French name “noisette”). At the same time, the milk solids begin to caramelize and acquire a wonderfully nutty flavor, while the golden color of the butter deepens to a light brown. (Clarifying the butter after melting it, as some American writers suggest, certainly lessens the risk of scorching, but it also eliminates something intrinsic to the sauce.) You can just get by with beurre noisette as a sautéing medium for something such as very rapidly scrambled eggs—but not with beurre noir, which is what you get if you let the cooking proceed even half a minute longer. This so-called black butter actually is a rich dark brown from almost-burnt milk solids, and has a stronger flavor than brown butter. At this instant (or seconds before), the pan must be snatched from the stove before you have really black butter, which would be inedible.