If you're going to eat a whole stick of butter with your crab, fish, or steamed or boiled lobster dinner, you might as well dress it up a little with the French language. On a vacation to Maine I decided to tang things up with one of the lobster dinners we had in our rented cottage.

Step 1: Ingredients

A beurre blanc is a pretty simple sauce to make that will have people thinking you're working some kind of voodoo mojo in your kitchen to come up with such a tasty thing.

You need:

A whisk

1 stick cold unsalted butter (cut into 1/2 or 1 tablespoon nuggets)
6 - 8 oz Dry white wine
1 - 2 oz Lemon juice (about 1 lemon)
1/4c Onion or, more traditionally, shallot (finely diced)
Salt and Pepper (white pepper if you're OCD)
Cream or milk

Here I added garlic, which I didn't add enough to really be able to tell that there was any in it at all. So you can skip that or add a whole lot more. I wonder how it would be to replace the onion entirely with garlic.It could be gross or it could be heaven, but if any of you try, let me know.

Step 2: Reduce and Strain

Add your wine, lemon juice, and onions to a sauce pot and turn on medium heat. Hit it with a pinch of salt and reduce the volume of liquid down to 1/3 to 1/4 cup. Strain off the solids and put the liquid back into the sauce pot on the stove.

Step 3: Butter

Cooks claim that cream helps to keep this sauce from breaking. I didn't have cream so I tossed in a tablespoon of milk and it worked fine.

Add the cream/milk and whisk it in over medium heat. When it starts to bubble, remove it from the heat and whisk in your butter one cube at a time. If it cools too much to melt the butter (it probably won't) just whisk it on the heat for ten to twenty seconds and then continue adding butter off heat until done.

That's it. Taste it for salt and pepper and be done with it. Slather it all over your favorite seafood, chicken, turkey, pork, beef, hot dog, bologna sandwich, taco whatever.

This sauce doesn't have to stop here though. Add your favorite herbs or maybe stir in some diced tomatoes and a little tomato paste for a pasta sauce that will make you drop your fork and weep.