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Horse-radish Hollandaise
To Hollandaise Sauce add a few drops of onion juice and five tablespoons grated horse-radish.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Hollandaise in front of you. The whole trick is keeping the sauce from breaking once you fold in a wet, acidic addition.
- Add off the heatFinish the Hollandaise first, then take it off the heat or out of the double boiler before stirring in the horseradish and onion juice. Cold, damp additions dropped into a hot emulsion are the usual cause of a curdled sauce.
- Five tablespoons is a lotThe amount presumes a full-sized batch of the book's Hollandaise (the base recipe's proportions are not repeated here), and it makes a distinctly hot, coarse-textured sauce. For a smaller batch scale it down and add in stages, tasting as you go.
- The horseradish'grated horse-radish' most likely means fresh root, grated. If you use prepared horseradish from a jar it carries vinegar and brine, so drain it well and, if the base sauce is sharpened with lemon, cut that back; drained volume, not jar volume, is what you want.
- Onion juiceA period technique: halve an onion and scrape the cut face against a grater or press it against a fine sieve to express juice without pulp. A few drops only, as written, or it dominates.
- Heat kills itBoth horseradish and onion lose their pungency quickly when warm. Serve within a few minutes of mixing, and never reheat the finished sauce.
- Holding the sauceKeep it barely warm over water well below a simmer. Too hot and the yolks tighten and the butter separates.
- EggsA Hollandaise is not usually taken to a temperature that pasteurises yolks. If serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurised shell eggs.
- What to serve it withRoast or boiled beef, corned beef, poached salmon, and boiled cauliflower or beets all take it well. Reckon on about two tablespoons a person.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, as a promotional volume in the early 1900s — hence its unusually full chocolate and confectionery chapters alongside a conventional general cookbook. This entry reflects the era's habit of treating Hollandaise as a mother sauce to be varied by a single addition, the way Escoffier's contemporaries catalogued dozens of derivative sauces under a parent. Horseradish and beef is a much older English pairing, generally traced to the seventeenth century, when the grated root was served in vinegar or cream; folding it into a butter-and-yolk emulsion is the later, French-influenced refinement of that idea, and it let an American cook of 1907 put a familiar country condiment on a formal table.