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.
The main difference between “brown” and “black” butter is not so much the degree of cooking as the way they are then treated. Black butter is invariably (and brown butter almost invariably) used sizzling hot, as a sauce for already cooked foods—cauliflower, artichokes, poached or fried eggs, cooked brains or sweetbreads, and most classically pan-fried fish such as skate, tinker mackerel, and smelts. Brown butter can be served as is, but usually includes a dash of lemon juice and sometimes chopped parsley (in which case, it is often called beurre meunière.) Black butter is always given a contrasting accent of vinegar (usually reduced) as well as a final handful of parsley. Capers can go into either, but are more usual with black butter.
The procedure is as follows: Put some unsalted butter in a small, fairly heavy saucepan or skillet. The amount depends on how much food you want to sauce; I’d allow about 1½ to 2 tablespoons per serving. Have the cooked food within easy reach, along with a small handful each of capers and minced parsley if you want to include them. For beurre noir, you should also have a few tablespoons of wine vinegar (any preferred kind) in a separate small saucepan; for beurre noisette, have a halved lemon ready for squeezing.
Melt the butter slowly over low heat, shaking the pan occasionally and watching it like a hawk. After the foam dies away, you will see it gradually change to a pale brown. If you are making beurre noir, bring the vinegar to a boil while the butter heats and let it reduce by about half. Keep it hot.
There are various ways of combining the butter and vinegar or lemon juice. For beurre noisette, the simplest is to promptly empty the pan of hot butter over the food, squeeze on a bit of lemon juice, and serve at once with or without parsley and capers scattered on top. Beurre noir takes a little more logistics to avoid a boil-over of something uniting the worst features of burnt butter and burnt vinegar. I find it easiest to let the butter cool for a few minutes before adding the hot vinegar, then returning the butter to the stove just long enough to make it sizzling hot. You can either toss the optional parsley and capers into the pan or scatter them over the food. In either case, pour the butter mixture over the food and serve at once. It should be eaten as hot as possible, before it loses its élan.
If either brown or black butter threatens to darken too fast, immediately arrest the cooking by setting the pan in a larger pan of cold water. Some people routinely do this the minute the butter is approaching the desired point. But be sure to reheat it before pouring it over the food.
Once you know how to make brown butter, you can experiment with melting it directly in a skillet that you have just used for fried eggs, pan-fried fish, etc. (I wouldn’t try it with black butter.) The goal here—a matter of practice—is to pick up nice browned flavors from the sautéing residues in the skillet, without letting them burn.
VARIATIONS: Butter cooked to the brown stage with no added ingredients is a wonderful sauce or hot topping for hot cooked spinach or other greens. It is also great splashed over dishes topped with Yogurt-Garlic Sauce. Goats’-milk and sheep’s-milk butter are particularly delicious for this purpose. A similar and very pretty last touch in Turkish cooking is to stir Aleppo pepper or other red pepper flakes into melting butter, take it off the heat just before the pepper burns, and drizzle it over a dish.
ABOUT BUTTER-AND-EGG CUSTARDS
The custard tribe is familiar to most of us through mixtures of the crème anglaise kind (this page), in which milk or cream dilutes eggs to a point where they become fairly stable under at least gentle cooking and will thicken to a smooth amalgam. But there is another custard-family branch based on subjecting butter and eggs to heat under conditions that stop them from curdling. The addition of sugar is one means. Highly sweetened butter-egg custards can take quite a lot of heat without breaking down, an aptitude that makes possible “sugar pie” fillings like those for pecan pie, Southern chess pie, and the famous Canadian butter tarts. (The Southern Buttermilk Pie is a cousin with more added liquid.)
Acid also helps increase the tolerance of egg proteins for heat; hence the allied clan of butter custards involving a combination of sugar and acid added to egg and butter. Like the sugar pie fillings, these can be cooked to higher temperatures than plain egg-and-butter mixtures without the egg proteins congealing into a curdled mess. Lemon Curd is the best-known acid- and sugar-stabilized custard.
Take away the sugar and you have something more fragile. Hollandaise sauce, with only a small amount of acid to temper the effect of heat, is the classic example: a delicate emulsion that needs just the right degree of cooking in order not to be ruined. Still trickier and more demanding is the ultimate in butter-custard minimalism: butter and eggs with no added ingredients, turned into a rarefied transformation of scrambled eggs that must cook at a snail’s pace over the lowest possible heat until it slowly thickens to a rich-flavored, barely runny custard.
What all these butter-egg custard dishes have in common is a magical way of melding the most delicate, evocative qualities of fresh butter and eggs into something more sensuous than either one alone. Aside from butter itself, eggs have a more intrinsically buttery flavor than almost any other food I can think of. Cooking the two together by gentle methods that let the egg proteins retain a fine, smooth continuity without degenerating into coarse clumps seems to take butter to another dimension.
HOLLANDAISE SAUCE
Why we stopped calling this “Dutch sauce” and started assuming that it was French in origin, I have no idea. It did indeed reach something like perfection when French cooks took to making it with Normandy butter, but it really dates back to the spectacular success of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch in grazing cattle on reclaimed sea bottom and selling butter and cheese to the rest of Europe. At the time, butter happened to be a surefire choice as an exportable cash crop; it had recently taken on new elegance and cachet as a sauce foundation in the cuisines of England, France, and the rest of northern Europe.
An influential kitchen preference of the day (especially in the Low Countries) was for sauces of melted butter combined with some acid element. A stewed-eel recipe in the celebrated seventeenth-century Dutch kitchen manual De Verstandige Kock mentions a sauce involving butter and vinegar mixed with a binder—in this case, egg. Here we have in at least rudimentary guise the elements of the later hollandaise, drawing on both the butter-based and the egg-based emulsion principles. But this didn’t instantly become the standard form.
Early “Dutch sauces” in English cookbooks often call for a strong-flavored vinegar mixture as the acid element and flour rather than egg as the binder. Though Eliza Acton’s magisterial Modern Cookery for Privat
e Families (1845) presents a “Dutch sauce” that any cook today would call a classic hollandaise, various roux-based mixtures continued to share the title. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the name “Dutch” was universally replaced by “hollandaise” in English and American cookbooks, and by the time of Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896), the sauce was generally understood to be an egg, butter, and lemon-juice emulsion.
That much is still generally understood, but otherwise it would be hard to find any classic sauce whose making is the object of as many disagreements. Any search of a few basic cookbooks will give you close to a dozen hollandaise philosophies. Before getting to my own preference, let me state that people who are already happy with another should stick to it. Good hollandaise can be made with the butter solid or previously melted, over direct heat, in a double boiler, altogether off the heat, with a whisk, with a wooden spoon, in a blender, in a food processor, with plain lemon juice or vinegar, with lemon juice or vinegar diluted with water and slightly reduced.… To cut to the chase, all these have been known to work just fine in plain hollandaise or its two most popular variations: béarnaise, made with a tarragon- and shallot-flavored vinegar reduction; and maltaise, where Seville orange juice replaces lemon juice. The only approach that I strongly quarrel with is using clarified butter. According to one wing of opinion, this produces a thicker sauce and eliminates any off flavors lurking in the residual buttermilk. I submit that (a) plain butter tastes more buttery; (b) there’s nothing wrong with a thinner sauce; and (c) if you don’t trust the butter to be delicious you shouldn’t be using it. It does, however, seem smart to use the kind of high-fat, low-moisture butter favored by pastry chefs, the fresher the better.
What to put it on? Addicts may wonder what not to put it on. It is a peerless partner to grilled, poached, or steamed fish, shellfish, and vegetables (especially asparagus). I have eaten it with plain poached chicken, broiled lamb chops, baked and boiled potatoes and sweet potatoes, and believe it or not, rice. Given the opportunity, I’d probably eat it with boiled newspaper.
I always use lemon juice, not vinegar, in hollandaise. If you’d like to try vinegar, I suggest the plainest possible white wine vinegar rather than something syrupy or herb-infused. I add the lemon juice straight and probably would do the same with vinegar, but there’s something to be said for an acid reduction with a slight concentration of flavors, as long as it’s not allowed to become too metallic-tasting. If you want to try it, replace the plain lemon juice in the following recipe with 2½ tablespoons white wine vinegar and 2½ tablespoons water. Put these in a small saucepan, carefully boil down to half the starting volume, and stir in a dash of cold water before adding the reduction to the eggs and proceeding as directed.
The following recipe is based on a version that I encountered decades ago in Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I have never had the courage to make the sauce directly on the heat instead of in a double boiler. I have also found that it’s a blessing and a reassurance to have a few emergency rescue measures—as suggested below—in place before you start, so that if the dread signs of curdling from excessive heat appear you can quickly stop or temper the cooking.
YIELD: About 1 cup
6 ounces (12 tablespoons, 1½ sticks) very fresh high-fat (about 83 to 85 percent) butter, either salted or unsalted
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (or the reduction described above)
½ to ¾ teaspoon salt (omit if using salted butter)
3 or (for more richness) 4 egg yolks
A pinch to ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
Cut the butter into about a dozen pieces, and set it on a plate to warm to room temperature.
Heat a little water—it should be less than an inch deep—in the bottom of a double boiler and turn it off when it comes to a boil. Mix the lemon juice and salt in the double boiler top and set it over the bottom. Whisk in the egg yolks. Turn on the heat but keep it low, so that the water remains hot without boiling. Whisking steadily, add a piece of butter and work it into the eggs as it melts. Give it a moment to become warmed and fully incorporated before adding another piece, whisking it in, and adding another. The trick is to add butter a little at a time while gradually achieving a temperature (about 160°F) that will semi-cook the egg protein without either thickening it so rapidly as to make it curdle or letting it languish in a cautious coolness that won’t thicken it at all.
If you think the mixture is heating too fast, there are four ways of slowing it down: (1) Whisk in a tablespoon of hot water; (2) take the whole double boiler from the burner and place it on a Flame Tamer over low heat; (3) briefly lift the top off the bottom and set it aside; or (4) put the top in a pan or bowl of cold water. Whisk furiously while performing any of these measures, then put everything back on the stove as before. At intervals, check to see that the water is not boiling in the bottom of the double boiler. By the time you have incorporated all the butter, the sauce should have a beautiful satiny sheen and the consistency of a light mayonnaise.
Quickly remove the double-boiler top and taste the sauce for seasoning. Add a little more salt or lemon juice to taste. If desired, add enough cayenne to give it a mild kick. Use it promptly, while still warm. Hollandaise is by nature a last-minute preparation, one of those things that people wait for instead of having it wait for them. If held for more than a few minutes it may break, but if it isn’t too far gone you may be able to salvage it by whisking in a little boiling water, or whisking a fresh egg yolk in a bowl and beating the sauce into it.
VARIATION: The hollandaise is just finished, the kitchen is steaming like a cauldron, and the dinner timetable has been thrown into chaos by some unforeseen glitch. How to avoid ruin? On such an occasion I discovered an out that actually proved to be a useful cold sauce in its own right: Scrape the warm hollandaise into a small pitcher or glass measuring cup. Pour in enough cold heavy cream to cover the top by barely half an inch. Set it in the refrigerator, where the hollandaise will quickly thicken. When it is nearly solid, work the cream into the sauce with a fork or whisk, adding a little more cream if necessary to bring it to a spreadable consistency. Stir in an extra dash or two of lemon juice and salt. Serve cool or at room temperature. Unlike freshly made hot hollandaise, this daughter-of-necessity version is blessedly stable. It goes beautifully with any of the usual hollandaise partners in their cold (or room-temperature) poached form.
“BUTTERED EGGS”
(SKILLET-CUSTARD EGGS)
The plainest of all egg-and-butter custards is also the most demanding to make, because there is nothing to hinder it from curdling except low heat and endless patience. Scrambled eggs cooked in this manner are to ordinary scrambled eggs as quenelles are to fish burgers, and are the one reason I see for anybody to own a nonstick pan. The only elements are eggs and butter very slowly stirred over the lowest possible heat until the whites coagulate in small, delicate bits and—this is the tricky part—the yolks and butter set to a thin custard, about the consistency of a faintly runny lemon curd without the lemon. If you are willing to dedicate three-quarters of an hour to standing over a nonstick skillet and don’t mind eating the result with a spoon, it is the holy grail of scrambled eggs. Needless to say, the freshest eggs and butter will taste the best.
For each serving
2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs
1 to 2 tablespoons heavy cream (optional)
The frugal-minded can cut back slightly on the butter and use two eggs. Since I make this only about twice a year, I usually splurge on three. Gently melt half of the butter in a heavy nonstick skillet, tilting the pan to coat the sides. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool to room temperature. Break the eggs directly into the pan and turn the heat to the lowest possible setting—and I mean lowest; if necessary, use a heat diffuser such as a Flame Tamer. With a wooden spatula or spoon, break up the yolks and begin stirring as slowly and evenly as possible. Keep stirring … and stirring and stirr
ing. It’s like watching paint dry, but there are no shortcuts. The eggs and butter will at first look like a blotchy and very peculiar soup. The egg whites will appear at least partly cooked after 10 or 15 minutes, but the yolks have a long way to go. Keep breaking up any clumps that threaten to form on the bottom of the pan. After 25 to 30 minutes of cooking, stir in the remaining butter along with the optional cream. By degrees the mixture will get smoother and slightly thicker, first starting to coat the back of a spoon, then throwing off a wisp of evaporation and leaving a clean track as you draw the spatula across the bottom of the pan. Keep going until it has cooked for 45 to 50 minutes in all and is a little thinner than a crème anglaise, then pour it over any preferred kind of toast and eat at once. Let everyone season his or her own with salt and pepper.
VARIATION: The scrambled-egg recipe in M. F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is a very similar but less labor-intensive dish of custardy eggs made with cream instead of butter. The ingredients are eight eggs and a cup of cream. The cream makes the mixture a little more tolerant of heat than the butter-custard version.
Fisher’s general instructions are to break the eggs into an unwarmed iron skillet before adding the cream, then begin to stir—not beat—from time to time “from the middle bottom” over very gentle heat without letting it boil. Continue to stir occasionally for about half an hour; some optional enrichment like herbs, cheese, mushrooms, or chicken livers (“and so forth”) can be added halfway through the cooking. Don’t try to hurry it. Stir in any seasonings at the very end and serve, just about set, on toast.
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