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Hollandaise Sauce
1 tablespoon flour 4 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon of cream Salt, pepper 1 tablespoon lemon juice Put the butter in a saucepan, when it is melted add the flour and mix well. Add one gill of milk and one gill of water gradually, stir over the fire until it is boiling. Cook for ten minutes, then add the cream, lemon juice and seasoning. It should have the consistency of thick cream. Three tablespoons of oil and one of vinegar may be used if desired.
This is a mock hollandaise: a butter-enriched white sauce sharpened with lemon, with no egg yolk and no emulsion to break. That makes it far more forgiving than the classic, but it needs attention to thickness.
- A gillA quarter of a pint. In US measure that is 1/2 cup, so the recipe calls for about 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup water, roughly a cup of liquid in all; on the imperial gill of 5 fl oz it would be somewhat more.
- Thickening is under-specifiedOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid gives a thin sauce by modern standards. The ten minutes of simmering is doing real work by evaporation; if it is still loose at the end, cook it down further rather than adding flour late.
- Cook out the flourThe full ten minutes matters. A roux this loose tastes raw and pasty if hurried, and there is no egg or long reduction to hide it.
- Add the butter thinkingFour tablespoons of butter to one of flour means most of the butter is flavour, not roux. Melt it, stir in the flour, and do not let the mixture colour — this should stay a white roux.
- Lemon juice goes in lastOff the heat, after the cream. Acid added to a simmering milk sauce encourages it to curdle and thins the starch.
- Salt and pepperNo quantities are given. Start at 1/4 teaspoon salt and a pinch of white pepper, then taste after the lemon, which will make it read saltier.
- The oil-and-vinegar variantThe recipe says only that three tablespoons of oil and one of vinegar 'may be used if desired', without saying what they replace; the quantities suggest they stand in for the butter and lemon juice. The milk and cream are still called for, so the result is not dairy-free.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for asparagus, broccoli or poached eggs for four.
Hollandaise is generally traced to a Dutch-influenced butter sauce that entered the French repertoire under a name meaning simply "in the Holland style"; by the late nineteenth century the classic version was fixed as an emulsion of egg yolk, butter and acid. What appears here is the household compromise usually printed as "mock hollandaise": a flour-thickened white sauce that borrows the lemon and butter but skips the yolks and the risk of splitting. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book is telling, and the oil-and-vinegar alternative at the end goes a step further still.