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Hollandaise Sauce (Put one-fourth a cup)
Put one-fourth a cup of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of butter, a grating of nutmeg and a dash of paprica over hot water to heat. Beat the yolks of four eggs, add the hot vinegar to them, return to the fire, and stir constantly while the mixture thickens; then add two more tablespoonfuls of butter in bits.
Shrimps, oysters, lobsters and delicate fish are all good when served after this recipe.
A chafing-dish hollandaise built on vinegar rather than lemon, with far less butter than the modern sauce. It behaves like a thin sabayon and needs the same gentle handling.
- The hinge: never let it get hot enough to scrambleThe yolks set between roughly 150F and 180F, and the sauce is finished the moment it coats the spoon. Keep the water in the pan below a simmer and lift the pan off the heat the instant it thickens; if it looks grainy, a hard whisk off the heat will sometimes pull it back.
- "Over hot water"This means the chafing dish set in its water bath, or a stainless bowl over a saucepan of hot water. The bowl should not touch the water and the water should steam rather than boil.
- Temper, don't dumpAdd the hot vinegar and butter to the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking. Pouring it in at once will set the yolks in threads before the sauce ever thickens.
- PapricaSimply paprika, an alternative spelling in use around 1900. "A dash" is about 1/8 teaspoon.
- The vinegar is assertiveA quarter cup of vinegar to four yolks is very sharp by current taste, and cider or white wine vinegar will be gentler than distilled. Modern hollandaise usually cuts this to a tablespoon or two, with lemon juice for the rest of the acid.
- Butter and saltFour tablespoons total for four yolks gives a light, custardy sauce rather than the rich emulsion most cooks expect; more butter, whisked in bit by bit off the heat, moves it toward the familiar version. The recipe gives no salt at all, so season at the end.
- Yield and the seafood noteAbout three-quarters of a cup, enough for four servings. The shrimps, oysters, lobster or fish are cooked separately and sauced; if you poach oysters for this, two minutes in their own liquor is enough, as a quarter hour turns them to rubber.
- Holding itThe sauce will not survive reheating and will break or curdle if held over direct heat. Make it last, and keep it no more than a few minutes over water that has been taken off the burner.
Hollandaise carries a Dutch name for a French sauce, and the connection is traditional rather than documented: it is generally traced to a butter-and-egg sauce associated with the Netherlands, absorbed into French cooking and codified there in the nineteenth century. The version here belongs to the American chafing-dish vogue of the 1890s and early 1900s, when the alcohol-lamp chafing dish became a fixture of the parlor and the late supper, and cookbooks filled with dishes that could be assembled at the table from cooked or tinned seafood. Its water pan was the practical reason such books could offer an egg sauce at all to hostesses cooking away from a stove.