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Sauce Hollandaise
1 cup drawn butter Juice of 1/2 lemon 1 teaspoon onion juice Yolks of 2 eggs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Make a drawn-butter sauce; remove it from the fire and add gradually the yolks of the eggs, well beaten. Stir in the lemon and onion juice and the chopped parsley. This is served with baked fish or fish croquettes.
This is the American hotel-kitchen version of hollandaise: a flour-thickened butter sauce enriched with yolks, not the whisked emulsion of French practice. It is more forgiving than a true hollandaise, but the yolks still set the limits.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterDrawn butter is not simply melted butter -- In American books of this period a "drawn-butter sauce" is usually a light sauce made with butter, flour and hot water or fish stock, cooked until smooth, though the term was also used loosely for melted butter alone. Plain melted butter gives the yolks far less to hold onto and the sauce is much likelier to separate.
- The hinge: heat controlTake the pan off the burner and let it stop bubbling before the yolks go in, then add them in a thin stream while stirring hard. Yolks dropped into a boiling sauce scramble into visible threads that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Egg safetyThe residual heat of the sauce warms the yolks but may not hold them at a pasteurizing temperature. Use pasteurized eggs, or set the pan back over very low heat and stir until the sauce reaches about 160F, stopping short of a simmer.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp in a sieve or a square of cheesecloth; a teaspoon of juice takes about that much onion. It gives sharpness without any texture.
- Amounts that need judgment"Juice of 1/2 lemon" is roughly 1 tablespoon. Add half, taste, then add the rest the sauce should be distinctly tart against baked fish.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; chop it fine and add at the very end so it stays green. Held on the stove it turns drab and grassy.
- Yield and holdingAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings of fish. Hold it in a covered bowl set over warm not simmering water for no more than half an hour; reheating over direct heat will curdle it.
"Drawn butter" was a workhorse fish sauce of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, and dressing it up with egg yolks, lemon and a green herb was one common domestic alternative to the far fussier French hollandaise, which demands yolks whisked with acid over gentle heat while butter is beaten in drop by drop. The name is often traced to the Dutch reputation for butter and for butter-and-egg sauces, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. By the early twentieth century "Hollandaise" had become a flexible label in American home cookery for almost any yellow, lemony butter sauce served with fish. The inclusion here alongside fish croquettes is telling: croquettes were commonly made from previously cooked fish, and a sauce like this was what made leftovers presentable at table.