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Hollandaise Sauce
Heat a bay-leaf and one tablespoon of chopped onion in two tablespoons of vinegar to the boiling point. Strain and cool. Blend two tablespoons of flour with one of butter; add one-half pint boiling water and stir until it boils; add vinegar. Take from fire and add the yolks of two eggs, one-half teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt, and one-eighth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper.
This is a flour-thickened "mock" hollandaise rather than the emulsified butter sauce of French practice, and it behaves quite differently: it is a velouté-style white sauce enriched with yolks and sharpened with a vinegar reduction. The hinge is the last step — once the yolks go in, the pan must not return to the heat.
- Add the yolks off the fire, and mean itThe sauce is boiling hot when it comes off the burner, which is enough to thicken two yolks as you stir them through. If it goes back over flame it will scramble into grains and no amount of whisking will bring it back.
- Half a pintOne cup of boiling water. With two tablespoons of flour that gives a fairly thick sauce, which then loosens as the strained vinegar and yolks go in.
- The roux is deliberately leanThe fat-flour paste is deliberately lean -- Two tablespoons flour to one of butter is more flour than fat, so the paste will look pasty. The recipe simply blends the two and adds the boiling water; add the water gradually to avoid lumps, and note that the sauce is then stirred until it boils, which cooks out the raw-flour taste.
- The vinegar infusionA bay leaf and chopped onion are brought just to the boiling point in two tablespoons of vinegar: a brief infusion rather than a long reduction. Strain out the solids and cool it before it meets the sauce, much as an acid-and-aromatic infusion supplies the sharpness in a bearnaise.
- Larkin salt and pepperLarkin was a Buffalo mail-order house whose cookbooks named its own grocery line throughout. Use any table salt and ground white pepper; white keeps the sauce pale.
- EggsThe residual heat of the pan cooks the yolks only partly, so this is not a fully cooked sauce. Pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- No lemonVinegar carries all the acidity here. A squeeze of lemon at the end is not in the original but suits the sauce, particularly over fish.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a quarter — enough for four to six servings over asparagus, cauliflower, poached eggs or boiled fish. Keep it warm over hot, not simmering, water and use it within the hour; it thickens as it stands and can be let down with a spoonful of hot water.
Flour-bound hollandaise of this kind was standard in American household cookery from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, and cookbooks of the period print it beside, or instead of, the butter emulsion. The reasoning was practical: a white sauce base is forgiving and holds on a stove-top for a whole meal service, whereas a true hollandaise wants constant attention and immediate serving. The bay-leaf-and-onion vinegar reduction here shares a principle with b inearnaise and its relatives, where an acid infusion supplies the sharpness that plain vinegar alone would give too bluntly. The named-brand salt and pepper mark this as a promotional cookbook falo built a large mail-order grocery and household-goods business and distributed recipe collections that kept its own products in front of the cook at every step.