Recipes with butter

Butter is an unstable emulsion: roughly a fifth water and a little milk protein held inside the fat. That water is what makes it spit in the pan, and those proteins are what brown and then blacken. Clarifying it — melting it gently, skimming the foam, leaving the milk solids behind — gives ghee, which has neither, and so takes far more heat before it burns.

Two families of cooking follow from that. The northern ones use it whole, often cold or barely melted, for the dairy flavour: Norwegian lefse is spread with butter and sugar, Karelian karjalanpiirakka is served under an egg-and-butter topping, Finnish ohrarieska comes out of the oven to meet it, and Russian blinis are bathed in it straight off the pan. The kitchens that clarify it treat it as a cooking fat in its own right: Indian pav bhaji mashes its vegetables into hot butter and griddles the buns in the same pan until they colour.

To fry hard without blackening, two options: clarify it, or add a spoonful of neutral oil, which raises the point at which it browns. Butter also picks up fridge smells, so keep it wrapped and away from leftovers, or freeze it for long storage. Swedish hasselbackspotatis and raggmunk, like Australian damper, want butter that tastes clean, not stale.