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Hollandaise Sauce
Beat half a tea-cup butter in a bowl to a cream, add yolks of two eggs, one by one, then juice of half a lemon, a pinch of cayenne pepper, half a tea-spoon salt; place this in a sauce-pan of boiling. water, beat with an egg beater, for a minute or two, until it begins to thicken, then add one-half cup of boiling water, beating all the time. When like soft custard it is done. It will take five minutes to cook if the bowl is thin and the water boils all the time.
A thin, water-lightened hollandaise built in a bowl over boiling water — closer to a warm emulsified sauce than the butter-heavy modern version. The whole thing hinges on keeping the eggs below the point where they scramble.
- The tea-cupA 19th-century tea-cup is an unstandardised measure, commonly reckoned at somewhere around three-quarters of a cup, so "half a tea-cup butter" is roughly 6 tablespoons, perhaps up to 8. Start with 6 tablespoons, softened to the texture of mayonnaise rather than melted, since it has to be creamed.
- The pan is a double boiler"Place this in a sauce-pan of boiling water" means set the bowl into the water, not the mixture into the pan. Use a heatproof bowl and keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- Temperature, not timeIgnore the five minutes and watch the sauce. Yolks thicken from about 150F and set hard past 180F, so pull the bowl off the heat the moment it coats the whisk like soft custard. If steam is escaping fast around the bowl, lift it off for a few seconds and keep beating.
- Adding the boiling waterThe half cup of boiling water is what makes this sauce pourable and thin; the recipe says only to beat all the time, but dribbling it in as with any emulsion is safer, since poured in at once it may thin the yolks faster than they can set.
- If it breaksA curdled hollandaise can usually be brought back: take it off the heat, beat in a tablespoon of cold water, and if that fails whisk the broken sauce a spoonful at a time into a fresh yolk in a clean bowl.
- Egg beaterA rotary egg beater works, but a balloon whisk reaches the corners of a bowl better and gives you more control as the sauce sets at the edges.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for four servings of asparagus, salmon or poached eggs. Serve within the half hour and hold it barely warm — reheating over direct heat will scramble it.
Hollandaise was already a fixture of American cookbooks by the 1870s and 80s, imported with the rest of the French sauce vocabulary that professional cooking had made fashionable; the name is generally traced to an older European habit of labelling rich butter-and-egg preparations "Dutch," Holland being associated with good butter. What is striking here is its placement among the catsups and sauces of a plain Midwestern household manual — perhaps a sign that the emulsified sauces had begun to filter down from hotel kitchens into ordinary domestic use. The version given is noticeably leaner than a restaurant hollandaise, thinned with half a cup of boiling water rather than loaded with butter, which may have served both to stretch an expensive ingredient and to make the sauce more forgiving on a wood-fired range where fine heat control was impossible.