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Dutch Sauce for Fish
Blend together two ounces of butter and a small tea-spoonful of flour, put it into a stewpan with equal quantities of water and tarragon vinegar (two table-spoonfuls of each), stir for a minute, and add the beaten yolks of two eggs, keeping up the stirring until the mixture thickens. It must not boil, and when ready to serve pour into it half the juice of a lemon. Make this sauce in a gallipot, placed in a saucepan of boiling water.
This is hollandaise under its older English name, stabilised with a little flour and soured with tarragon vinegar rather than lemon alone. The whole recipe hinges on heat control.
- Never let it boilThe yolks set into curds well below simmering point. Hold the water beneath the bowl at a bare shiver and pull the sauce off the heat while it is still pourable; it thickens further as it stands.
- GallipotA small glazed earthenware jar. Any heatproof bowl set over a pan of hot water does the same job; the point is gentle, indirect heat. The recipe mentions a stewpan first and then directs that the sauce be made in a gallipot in a saucepan of boiling water; taking the later instruction as the operative one, make the whole thing in the bowl.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons or 55 g. Two tablespoons each of water and tarragon vinegar is right for that much butter, and the "small teaspoonful" of flour should be scant — it is there as insurance, not as a thickener.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth using; it gives the sauce its particular perfume. Plain white wine vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped in it for an hour is a fair substitute. Malt or cider vinegar is too assertive.
- Beurre manié firstWork the flour into the soft butter completely before it goes near heat. Lumps of dry flour will not disperse once the yolks are in, and you cannot whisk hard enough to fix it without scrambling the sauce.
- Add the yolks off the boilBeat the yolks with a spoonful of the warm butter mixture before adding them to the rest. Tipping cold yolks into hot fat is how this sauce breaks.
- Lemon at the endThe juice goes in after the sauce has thickened, as written. Added early, the extra acid slackens the emulsion and the sauce tastes flat and sharp rather than rounded.
- Yield and servingAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough for roughly four portions of poached or grilled fish. Serve it promptly; it reheats badly and does not hold well in a warm oven.
Nineteenth-century English cookery books routinely called egg-and-butter sauces "Dutch sauce," a straight translation of the French sauce hollandaise, and the two names sat side by side in print for decades before hollandaise won out. The version here belongs to the cautious British school: a whisper of flour to keep the emulsion from splitting, and vinegar rather than lemon as the main acid. A sauce like this was taught as a technique — the bain-marie, the bowl of water beneath, the rule against boiling — to be applied to whatever the fishmonger had. The gallipot is the giveaway of its age: a small glazed apothecary's jar, common enough in a Victorian kitchen to be named without explanation.