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Bearnaise Sauce
Take three shallots finely chopped, six pepper-corns, a sprig of thyme, and half a gill of tarragon vinegar, and put all together in a stewpan; cover and boil till well reduced, remove the thyme, add one tablespoonful of white sauce and a little meat glaze. Remove the stewpan from the fire, whisk in four yolks of eggs, and work in four ounces of butter in small pieces. Strain through a pointed strainer or tammy. A little finely chopped tarragon may be added after the sauce is strained. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A classical béarnaise, written for a cook who already knows how to hold an emulsion. The reduction and the butter are straightforward; the yolks are where it goes wrong.
- Half a gill of vinegarA gill is a quarter-pint, 5 fl oz, so half a gill is 2½ fl oz, about 70 ml, or roughly five tablespoons. Reduced with the shallots and peppercorns it should end up as a scant tablespoon of intensely flavoured liquid.
- Off the heat means off the heatThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to remove the stewpan from the fire before the yolks go in. Whisked over direct flame they scramble in seconds; the residual heat of the pan plus the warmth of the butter is what thickens the sauce. If it looks like it is tightening too fast, lift the pan and keep whisking.
- White sauceA spoonful of béchamel or a light velouté, used here as insurance — the starch stabilises the emulsion and makes it far harder to split. Modern kitchens usually omit it, but it is worth keeping if you are nervous.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid when cold. A teaspoon of a good commercial demi-glace or reduced beef stock does the same job. It is there for depth and colour, not for meatiness as such.
- Butter in small piecesCold or barely softened butter, added a knob at a time, gives you control over the temperature. Four ounces is about 115 g against four yolks -- an egg-heavy ratio compared with modern practice, where something nearer six ounces of butter to three yolks is common.
- TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth the sauce was wrung through. A conical chinois or a fine sieve is the modern equivalent; a doubled square of muslin over a sieve works as well.
- The yolks and heatBéarnaise is not cooked to a temperature at which egg is pasteurised. It should be made shortly before serving, held no more than an hour at warm room temperature or in a barely tepid bain-marie, and not offered to anyone advised against lightly cooked egg.
- YieldAbout a cup — enough for six to eight portions alongside grilled steak, or four if it is going over poached eggs or asparagus.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, where a chef often named as Collinet is said to have devised it; the name nods to Béarn, the birthplace of Henri IV, whose statue and legend the restaurant traded on. The attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the sauce is in any case simply a hollandaise built on a sharp shallot-and-tarragon reduction rather than on lemon. Its appearance in Cassell's shows how thoroughly the French mother-sauce system had been absorbed into English professional cookery by the late nineteenth century — the reader is expected to know what a tammy is, what meat glaze is, and to have white sauce already standing by.