Home › Sauces › Salt and Pepper (Boil up the sauce add)
Salt and Pepper (Boil up the sauce add)
Boil up the sauce; add the butter and yolks of eggs to it; stand it in a saucepan of hot water, and whisk it well over the fire till it thickens; it must not boil, or it will curdle and be spoilt.
Season to taste with salt and pepper, and at the last stir in the lemon-juice. Fish stock or chicken stock may, if liked, be incorporated in order to give the required flavour.
Sauce Hollandaise (No. 2).
Ingredients.
Six ounces of fresh Butter.
Quarter of an ounce of fine Salt.
Three yolks of fresh Eggs.
A pinch of crushed Pepper.
Quarter of a gill of Water.
Juice of half a Lemon.
Put the pepper, salt, water, and butter, broken in pieces, into a saucepan; add the yolks of eggs; put the saucepan over a basin of hot water, let it get hot by degrees, and whip it, turning the whisk between both hands until it becomes frothy; take care not to let it boil. Flavour it well, and add salt and lemon-juice according to taste. Pass it through a sieve, and keep hot over a basin of hot water.
Two versions of hollandaise run together here: the tail of one method, then a complete second recipe with quantities. The second is the one to follow; it is a cold-start emulsion, gentler and more forgiving than the modern reduction-and-drizzle method.
- The hinge: never let it boilYolks begin to set from around 150F and the emulsion breaks if it goes much hotter. Keep the water beneath at a bare shiver, not a simmer, and pull the pan off the heat whenever the sauce feels warmer than a fingertip is comfortable with.
- A quarter of a gillA gill is a quarter pint; in British measure that is 5 fl oz, so a quarter gill is about 1 1/4 fl oz, a shade over 2 tablespoons. That is the whole liquid content besides the lemon juice, and it is what keeps the yolks from scrambling early.
- Quarter ounce of saltThat is about 7 grams, a good teaspoon of fine salt for six ounces of butter, which reads high to a modern palate. Start with half and correct at the end, as the recipe itself tells you to.
- Cold butter, broken upThe butter goes in cold and in pieces along with the yolks rather than being poured in warm and clarified. This slows the whole thing down and is the reason the method tolerates a beginner; do not shortcut it by melting the butter first.
- "Over a basin of hot water"A saucepan set over a bowl of hot water, off the direct flame, is the period's improvised bain-marie. A stainless bowl over a pan of hot water works identically; a double boiler with the water actually boiling is too hot.
- Whisking between both handsThe wooden-handled whisk was spun by rolling it between the palms rather than beaten. Any balloon whisk does the job, but the point stands: constant motion, reaching the sides and base, or the yolks set where they touch the metal.
- If it splitsTake it off the heat at once, and whisk a spoonful of the broken sauce into a fresh yolk or a tablespoon of hot water in a clean bowl, then work the rest in gradually.
- Straining and holdingPassing it through a sieve catches any set specks of yolk and the crushed pepper. Held over warm water it keeps perhaps an hour; once chilled it does not reheat reliably.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for six portions of poached fish, asparagus or eggs. The yolks are cooked only to a custard, so use very fresh eggs, or pasteurised ones if serving anyone vulnerable.
Hollandaise bears a foreign name; the usual explanation, traditional rather than documented, is that it was named for a Dutch-style butter-and-egg sauce, and older English and French books sometimes call much the same thing "Dutch sauce." By the late nineteenth century it had been absorbed thoroughly into the professional repertoire, which is why a book of "high class" cookery gives two numbered variants side by side, one thickened over a stock base and one built purely from butter and yolks. The instruction to whip the whisk "between both hands" is a small window onto the equipment of the day, when a stiff bundle of birch twigs or a heavy wired whisk was rolled rather than swung.