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Dutch Sauce
Put four ounces of butter, three well-beaten yolks of eggs, a tea-spoonful of flour, and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice or vinegar into an earthenware pipkin, or stir it very gently over the fire in a bain-marie. As the butter melts, stir constantly, and take care it does not curdle, which it will do if it is allowed to boil. A few drops of vinegar may be added just before serving if thought necessary. This sauce has a pleasant sour flavour. It is specially adapted for asparagus, cauliflower, sea-kale, artichokes, boiled fish, meat, or poultry; in fact, anything requiring a delicate sharp sauce. The leaves picked from a bunch of parsley pounded in a mortar to extract the juice, simmered for a few minutes and added to half a pint of bechamel sauce, with a little salt, cayenne, and the juice of half a lemon stirred in just before serving, make what is called "Green Dutch Sauce." Simmer till thick. Probable cost, 8d.
This is hollandaise under its older English name, stabilised with a little flour so it is more forgiving than the modern emulsion. Everything depends on keeping the pan below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilYolk proteins begin to thicken at around 150F/65C and set by roughly 158-160F/70C, and once they overcook the sauce breaks into curds and butter. Keep the water in the bain-marie hot but not bubbling and pull the pan off the heat the moment the sauce coats the spoon.
- VesselsA pipkin is a small earthenware pot with a handle; any heavy non-reactive saucepan or a metal bowl set over barely simmering water does the same job. Avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which will grey the lemon-sharpened sauce.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of butter is about 115 g, or one US stick. A teaspoonful of flour is about 3 g; a dessert-spoonful is roughly two teaspoons, so 10 ml of lemon juice or vinegar.
- Why the flour is thereThe starch raises the temperature at which the yolks coagulate and helps hold the sauce together, so this version is more forgiving than a flour-free hollandaise. Keep it if you want the insurance, and let the sauce hold at thickening point briefly -- without boiling -- to take the edge off any raw-flour taste.
- Butter cold and in piecesThe original has the butter melting into the yolks as the whole thing warms. Cut it into small cubes and add them a few at a time rather than dropping in the whole block, which cools the pan unevenly and encourages the mixture to break.
- If it curdlesTake it off the heat at once and whisk in a tablespoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it drop by drop. It will not come back once the eggs have scrambled visibly.
- Yield and holdingAround three-quarters of a cup, enough for about four servings alongside asparagus or fish. It does not reheat well; make it as the vegetables come out of the water.
- Green Dutch SauceHalf a pint here is the imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 284 ml of bechamel. Pound the parsley and press out the juice through a sieve or muslin. Note that the original simmers the parsley juice and then the finished sauce 'till thick'; prolonged heat will dull the green towards olive.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 8d." is eightpence in pre-decimal money, the sort of price comparison Cassell's gave throughout for household budgeting. It has no bearing on the method.
English cookery books of the nineteenth century used "Dutch sauce" and "sauce hollandaise" more or less interchangeably, the French name gradually winning out in professional kitchens while the English one lingered in domestic manuals like this one. The association with the Netherlands is generally traced to the country's reputation for butter rather than to any specific Dutch dish, and warm butter-and-yolk sauces of this kind appear in French sources well before the name settled. The flour is the tell that this is a household recipe rather than a restaurant one: a professional cook working to Escoffier's method emulsifies yolks and butter alone and accepts the risk, while Cassell's reader, cooking over an unregulated range, gets a starch safety net. The list of intended partners -- asparagus, cauliflower, sea-kale, artichokes, boiled fish -- is a fair snapshot of what a late-Victorian kitchen garden and fishmonger supplied, sea-kale in particular being a popular forced winter vegetable that has since largely dropped out of British cooking.