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Hollandaise Dressing
(For hot or cold fish or meats, asparagus, cauliflower, etc.) Put four tablespoonfuls of Pompeian Olive Oil in a double boiler, add the beaten yolks of four eggs and beat well together; then add one and one-half tablespoonfuls of lemon juice, one-half teaspoonful of salt and one-tenth teaspoonful of Cayenne pepper; then add slowly one cup of hot water, stirring constantly until it thickens but do not boil. Remove from the fire and continue to stir for a few minutes.
It should be creamy and consistent.
It is a mark of distinction for any housekeeper to use imported Pompeian Olive Oil.
This is a hollandaise in name and role only: the butter has been replaced by olive oil and the sauce is stretched with a cup of hot water, which puts it closer to a savoury egg custard than to the emulsified sauce most cooks expect. Treat it as such and it behaves well.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe yolks set at roughly 160-180F and curdle not far above that. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and pull the pan the moment the sauce coats a spoon. Stirring off the heat for a minute or two, as directed, stops the carry-over cooking.
- Add the hot water in a thin streamA cup of water against four yolks is a lot of liquid. Pour it in slowly while whisking, as with any custard, or the yolks will scramble in ribbons before the sauce has a chance to thicken.
- One-tenth teaspoonful of CayenneAn unmeasurable quantity in a modern kitchen. It means a scant pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon; start there and correct at the end.
- Olive oil instead of butterUse a mild oil. A robust, peppery modern extra-virgin will dominate the sauce, particularly over asparagus or white fish. The oil is beaten into the yolks rather than whisked in as melted butter would be, and the sauce is then let down with a cup of water, so expect something looser than a classic hollandaise.
- Yield and consistencyAbout one and a half cups, enough for six to eight servings as a sauce. It should pour, not mound; if it thickens past that point it has gone too far.
- It will not holdMade without butter and thinned with water, this separates and skins over as it cools. Make it in the last ten minutes before serving and keep it over the switched-off water bath, whisking occasionally.
- The last sentenceThat line about the mark of distinction is advertising copy, not instruction. This book was published by an oil company, and the brand name in the ingredient list can be read as ordinary olive oil.
Pompeian was one of several American olive oil firms that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, published small free recipe booklets to persuade households that oil belonged in everyday cooking rather than only in the medicine chest or the imported-goods aisle. That commercial purpose explains the odd shape of this recipe: hollandaise is a butter sauce by definition, and rewriting it around olive oil is the whole point of printing it here. The sauce's name simply means "Dutch," and is traditionally said to refer to the butter and eggs associated with the Netherlands, though the attribution is folk etymology rather than documented history; French cooks had placed it among the mother sauces by the early twentieth century, in Escoffier's codification. Serving it over asparagus and cauliflower, as the headnote suggests, was common in American household cookery of the period, where a rich egg sauce was one way to make a plain boiled vegetable fit for company.