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Two Shalots (Half a gill of Tarragon)
Half a gill of Tarragon Vinegar.
Half a gill of Vinegar.
One gill of White Sauce.
Yolks of three Eggs.
Two ounces of Butter.
Chop up the shalots and put them into a stewpan with the vinegar, and boil till reduced to a tablespoonful; then add the white sauce, mixing it well; add one at a time the three yolks of eggs, whisking each one well in before adding another, and on no account let it boil. When the eggs are in, remove the stewpan from the fire and whisk in the butter in small pieces, taking care that each piece is dissolved before adding the next, as, if the butter is added too quickly, the sauce will oil.
Tammy through muslin, and it is ready for use.
This is a béarnaise built on a velouté or béchamel base rather than a straight butter emulsion — a Victorian professional's version, more stable than the modern one and easier to hold. A few conventions need translating.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or the eggs will scramble and the emulsion will break. Keep the pan on the lowest heat or work over barely steaming water, and pull it off entirely before the butter goes in, as the recipe directs.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, five fluid ounces, about 150 ml. So half a gill is roughly 75 ml or a scant third of a cup, and the white sauce is about 150 ml.
- ShalotsSimply shallots. Two banana shallots or three or four small round ones, chopped as finely as you can manage — they are strained out at the end, but fine chopping extracts more flavour into the vinegar.
- The reductionBoiling two-thirds of a cup of vinegar down to one tablespoon takes eight to twelve minutes in a wide pan and concentrates the acid sharply. Do not walk away from the last minute of it; a dry, scorched shallot reduction cannot be rescued.
- White SauceA flour-thickened base rather than plain cream: in period usage either a velouté made with veal or chicken stock or a béchamel, depending on what the sauce was to accompany. It should be thick enough to coat a spoon before the yolks go in.
- Whisking in the butterTwo ounces is 55 g. Cold butter, cut into eight or ten pieces, added one at a time off the heat. The warning about oiling is real: added too fast, the fat separates out and the sauce goes greasy and thin.
- Tammy through muslinA tammy was a worsted straining cloth; the verb means to force the sauce through it for smoothness. A fine chinois or a double layer of damp muslin over a sieve does the same job and removes the shallot debris.
- Yield and holdingMakes roughly 250 ml, enough for four to six portions with grilled steak, chicken or salmon. Hold it warm rather than hot, in a bowl over warm water, for no more than half an hour; it will not survive reheating.
Sauce béarnaise is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name nodding to Henri IV's birthplace in Béarn rather than to any Béarnais cooking tradition. What is interesting about this version is that it is not the emulsion of yolks and clarified butter that Escoffier codified: it leans on a gill of ready-made white sauce, which does much of the thickening and makes the whole thing far harder to split. The tarragon vinegar cut with plain vinegar, rather than fresh tarragon steeped in wine, points the same way — a store-cupboard shortcut for a kitchen turning out many sauces at once.