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Bernaise Sauce
Use tarragon instead of plain vinegar, omit the water, with the exception of one tablespoonful, and the hollandaise becomes bernaise sauce. Oil may be used in the place of butter. The sauce resembles a firm mayonnaise, and, as it keeps its shape well, is particularly adapted for garnishing with pastry bag and tube.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone method: it assumes you have just read the book's hollandaise and are altering it. A few things need spelling out before it will work.
- You need the base recipe firstThe instruction only makes sense alongside the hollandaise immediately preceding it in the book — egg yolks, butter, lemon or vinegar, worked over hot water. Nothing here tells you the quantities or the method, so read the two together.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping a handful of fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week or two. It is the whole point of the sauce; cider or distilled vinegar will give you a sharp hollandaise and nothing more.
- What is missing by modern standardsA present-day béarnaise reduces the vinegar with shallot, peppercorns and tarragon stalks, then finishes with chopped fresh tarragon and chervil. This version relies on flavoured vinegar alone, which is why it reads thinner than the sauce you may expect.
- The hinge: yolk temperatureEgg yolks set at roughly 150-160F. Work over barely simmering water, off the heat as often as on, and pull the pan the moment the sauce thickens and coats the whisk. Overheated yolks curdle and cannot be whisked smooth again.
- The single tablespoon of waterKeep it. The small amount of liquid thins the yolks and buffers the heat as they cook, and dropping it entirely makes the sauce more likely to break.
- Oil instead of butterThe recipe offers this as an alternative, though the sauce loses its butter flavour. Add a neutral oil in a slow thread; olive oil can turn bitter when emulsified hard.
- Piping itThe book says the sauce keeps its shape well enough for a bag and tube. It will pipe most cleanly when cool and stiff, about the consistency of soft butter; warming it to serve will slacken it again.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, its name a nod to Henri IV of France, who came from Béarn — a story repeated in almost every sauce book and documented in none of them convincingly. What is certain is that by the time this book appeared, the classic French emulsions had been absorbed into American household cookery and treated as a family of small variations on one another, exactly as this entry does: change the acid, cut the water, and hollandaise becomes something else. The suggestion of piping it through a pastry tube belongs squarely to the period's chafing-dish and cold-buffet fashion, when sauces were expected to hold a shape on a platter as much as to be poured.