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Orange Hollandaise
To Hollandaise Sauce add juice and rind of one orange and few grains of cayenne.
A one-line derivative sauce that assumes you already have hollandaise in the pan. Everything depends on how you add the orange, since an emulsion held together by egg yolk and butter will break if you flood it with cold liquid.
- Read the base recipe firstThis is an instruction to modify hollandaise, not a standalone recipe. Use the book's own hollandaise, or any standard version, and hold it off direct heat before adding anything.
- Cut the lemon backOrange juice brings its own acid and a good deal of water. Reduce the lemon in the base to a teaspoon or so, or the sauce will taste sharp and thin.
- "Rind" means zestGrate only the colored outer layer, or remove it in strips with a peeler and mince it fine. Any white pith carried over turns the sauce bitter.
- Juice of one orange is a lotA medium orange gives roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup, which can be enough to break a small emulsion. Add a tablespoon at a time, whisking until absorbed, and stop when the sauce is loose but still coats a spoon; or reduce the juice by half first and add all of it.
- Few grains of cayenneA pinch, no more than 1/8 teaspoon. It is there for warmth against the sweetness, not for heat you can identify.
- Holding itKeep the finished sauce between 130 and 150F in a bowl over warm, not simmering, water. Above that the yolks scramble; refrigerated and reheated it will separate.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the hollandaise you start from. Traditionally sent out with asparagus, broccoli or poached fish, and it suits duck or roast pork as well.
Hollandaise in American cookbooks of this period was less a single sauce than a platform: the standard books list variations built by adding one thing to the finished emulsion, and this brief entry is a fair sample of the genre. The orange version has a French counterpart in sauce maltaise, generally traced to the use of blood oranges shipped from Malta, and it is usually served with asparagus. That it appears here at all reflects the shape of Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer. The book exists to put Lowney's cocoa in American kitchens, but its chapters on sauces for meat and vegetables are as thorough as any general cookbook of the day.