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Dutch Sauce for Fish
1/2 teaspoonful flour. 2 ounces butter. 4 tablespoonfuls vinegar. Yolks of two eggs. Juice of half a lemon. Salt to the taste.
Put all the ingredients, except the lemon juice, into a stew pan; set it over the fire and keep constantly stirring. When it is sufficiently thick, take it off as it should not boil. If however, it happens to curdle, strain the sauce through a taminy add the lemon juice, and serve. Tarragon vinegar may be used instead of plain and by many is considered far preferable.--Mrs. C.
This is hollandaise under its older English name, made the thrifty way with vinegar rather than a reduction and a pinch of flour as insurance. Everything depends on heat control.
- Never let it boilThe whole recipe hangs on this line. Yolks begin to set well below boiling -- in a sauce this thin somewhere in the 160-180F range -- so work over barely simmering water in a bowl or a heavy pan off direct flame, and pull it the moment it coats the spoon.
- Measures2 ounces butter is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. Two yolks and 4 tablespoons vinegar make a sharp, thin sauce by modern taste; you may prefer 2 to 3 tablespoons, or to boil the vinegar down by half first.
- The flourHalf a teaspoon of flour in this quantity is a stabiliser, not a thickener. Rub it into the softened butter before it goes in the pan so it does not sit in lumps.
- TaminyA tammy was a fine worsted straining cloth. A fine-mesh sieve or a doubled square of muslin does the same job, and a few seconds in a blender will often bring a broken sauce back without straining at all.
- Butter in piecesThe original puts everything in cold together, which works if the pan warms slowly. Cutting the butter into small cubes makes the emulsion far more reliable.
- Egg safetyHeld at 160F for a few seconds the yolks are safe as well as thick; an instant-read thermometer takes the guesswork out. Do not hold the finished sauce warm for more than an hour, and do not reheat it.
- Lemon lastAdding the juice off the heat, as directed, keeps the fresh citrus note and lets you correct the acidity after tasting.
- YieldAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough for four servings of poached or grilled fish.
"Dutch sauce" was a common English name in nineteenth-century cookbooks for what French kitchens called sauce hollandaise, and English versions of it are often vinegar-based and sometimes carry a little flour, unlike the classic French reduction-and-clarified-butter method. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries close with an initial like "Mrs. C." rather than a full name. The suggestion of tarragon vinegar points toward the same flavour that defines béarnaise; herb-flavoured vinegars were one way of keeping a summer herb useful through the winter.