Culinary jottings

Fancy butters have of late become justly popular. There are many ways of making them. The objects you must keep in view when composing a fancy butter, may be thus summed up : — a pleasant flavour, a pretty tint, and novelty. To secure the first it is imperatively necessary that the basis upon which you work be beyond suspicion. The butter you use must be the best possible. If, therefore, you cannot make it at home from cream you have set under your own eye, I strongly advise you to use that of a freshly opened " Denmark'' tin. You must wash the butter well with milk, and form it with your butter-bat, setting it in ice afterwards. The colouring is clap-trap work : you can get a nice green tint from '* spinach greening," and a pretty orange scarlet from crab, or tinned lobster coral. Novelty rests with yourself : you can ring the changes upon pounded anchovies, sardines, soft herring roes, lobster, prawns, crab, and pilchards : you can use capers, parsley, water-cress, garden-cress, gherkins, and olives. By the judicious selection of your ingredients, all of which are agreeable in fancy butter, you will avoid sameness, and secure success. This is my recipe for a stock " green-butter" : — 1. — Weigh a quarter of a pound of butter such as I have described, and ice it. 2. — Boil a couple of good handfuls of spinach, drain them thoroughly, pass the leaves through the hair sieve, and save all the jDulp, so obtained, in a bowl. 3. — Take six full sized anchovies from the tin, wipe them free from oil, pick out their back bones, pass them through the hair sieve, and save the pulp. 4. — Mince as finely as possible sufficient curled parsley to fill a table-spoon generously. 5. — Mince also as finely as possible capers sufficient to fill a tea-spoon, heaped up. 6. — Having these ingredients ready, first colour the butter by working into it, as lightly as you can, enough '' spinach-greening" to secure the tint you require (it is always wise to order a little more spinach than you think you may want, to be on the safe side) then add the other things by degrees, and when thoroughly 'incorporated, trim the butter into a tasteful mould, or sundry pretty patties, and set it in the ice-box. Maitre d' hot el butter I have already given (page 82.) It is quite worthy of a place amongst hors d'ceiivres. Prawn butter, — a highly delicious composition, should be made in this way : — Boil the prawns, clean them carefully, pound them to a paste in your mortar, mixing a little butter with them to assist the operation. Now, melt some butter in a sauce-pan, mix your pounded prawn meat in it, and as soon as it appears to have absorbed the butter (having been well stirred during the process and flavoured with a very little cayenne pepper, and powdered mace) take it out, let it get cold and mix it with yonr iced butter in the proportion of about half and half. The pounding must be thorough ; there should be no granulated particles of prawn meat in the butter.