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Sauce Hollandaise
Make a Drawn Butter; when you have finished it, take it from the fire, and add gradually the yolks of two eggs (beaten); then add juice of half a lemon, a teaspoonful of onion juice, and a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Serve with boiled or baked fish and fish croquettes.
This is the American drawn-butter version of hollandaise, not the French emulsion of butter beaten into yolks. The book assumes you have already read its drawn butter recipe, so the quantities live elsewhere.
- What drawn butter means hereIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter is a cooked sauce of butter, flour and hot water or fish stock, the flour and butter usually in similar proportion, though books differ and this one gives no quantities on the page. It is not the clarified butter that the same phrase means in a modern British book.
- The hinge: off the heatThe instruction to take the pan from the fire before the yolks go in is the whole trick. Add them a spoonful at a time into the hot sauce, stirring constantly; if the pan goes back over direct heat the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Egg safetyThe residual heat of the sauce may not carry the yolks to a safe temperature, so use pasteurized eggs if you are serving anyone frail, or hold the finished sauce over hot — not boiling — water at about 150–160F for a few minutes, stirring.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it on a microplane and squeeze. Minced onion is not a substitute; it stays raw and crunchy in a sauce that cannot be simmered.
- Lemon lastThe acid from half a lemon is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons. Add it after the yolks are incorporated, as the recipe directs; acid stirred into a starch-thickened sauce earlier can loosen it.
- Holding and reheatingThis keeps far better than a true butter emulsion because the flour stabilizes it, but it still will not take a boil. Keep it in a bowl set over warm water and stir in a spoonful of hot stock if it stiffens.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. If built on a cup of drawn butter, the finished sauce would come to something like a cup and a quarter, enough for perhaps four to six servings of fish.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American genre of summer cookery, aimed at households trying to feed themselves without heating a coal range for hours; sauces built on a quick flour-and-butter base, rather than a long reduction, fit that program exactly. The name is often said to honor the Dutch, though its origin is unsettled, and butter-and-egg sauces of this type appear in French cookery well before the name hollandaise became fixed; but what appears here is the naturalized American cousin: drawn butter, the workhorse fish sauce of the period, enriched with yolks and sharpened with lemon. The addition of onion juice and chopped parsley pushes it closer to what a French kitchen would call a sauce bâtarde or a green sauce than to a modern hollandaise, and the flour is why: it forgives the cook, which is precisely what a book of hot weather dishes wanted.