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Dutch Sauce for Fish
Take a tablespoonful of flour and three of water; make it boil and add the yolks of three eggs; melt one-half pound of butter and beat it gently into your first mixture, add salt, the juice of half a lemon and a pinch of grated nutmeg. Keep the sauce very hot in a bain-marie or in a double saucepan. If you have neither, keep it in a large cup placed in a saucepan of hot water. Bearnaise Sauce (Very good with stewed meat) Put some onions to cook in tarragon vinegar and water; when they are half done, add more water and throw in a little thyme and a leaf or two of bay; let it cook for one hour and pass it through a sieve. Melt some butter in a pan and thicken it with flour; put your vinegar to it and more water if you think it necessary; stir in salt and pepper and the yolks of two eggs or more, according to the quantity that you wish to make. Let it get thick, and just as you take it off the fire add a sprinkle of chopped parsley and a pat of butter. This is a useful sauce and it well repays the trouble.
Two sauces run together on one page: a flour-stabilised hollandaise ("Dutch sauce" is simply the English name for it) and a roux-based tarragon sauce called béarnaise. Both are more forgiving than their restaurant cousins because the starch keeps the yolks from splitting.
- The hinge: never let the yolks boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must stay below about 180F/82C. The tablespoon of flour buys you real insurance against curdling, but direct heat will still scramble it. Work over barely steaming water, not a rolling boil.
- The butter quantity is deliberateHalf a pound of butter to three yolks is a rich ratio, at the generous end of modern hollandaise practice, and it makes a very rich, loose sauce. Beat it in a little at a time off the direct heat; adding it too fast can break the emulsion, though the flour in the base gives some protection.
- YieldThe Dutch sauce makes about a cup and a half, enough for six to eight portions of poached fish. The béarnaise is written open-ended, scaled by how many yolks you use; it gives no quantities for butter, flour or liquid at all, so the yield depends entirely on how you scale it.
- Bain-marieAny heatproof bowl over a pan of hot water does the job, as the recipe itself allows. Hold it at serving temperature for no more than half an hour; these sauces do not reheat and do not refrigerate well.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth buying rather than substituting. If you only have white wine vinegar, steep a good handful of fresh tarragon in it warm for an hour first, or the sauce loses its whole point.
- The béarnaise reductionAn hour of simmering onions in vinegar and water softens the acid and draws out the herbs. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with water if it threatens to go dry, then pass it through a sieve as directed.
- This is not classical bearnaiseThe Escoffier version is a butter emulsion with a tarragon reduction and no flour. This one is built on a roux, let down with the strained vinegar and finished with yolks, closer to a sauce batarde than to a true bearnaise. It is sturdier and holds longer, and it suits the stewed meat the headnote recommends.
- Season at the endThe Dutch sauce asks only for salt (plus lemon and nutmeg); the bearnaise calls for salt and pepper stirred in with the yolks. Taste after the butter is in, since the fat mutes salt and acid. The bearnaise's final pat of butter goes in off the heat, as the recipe directs.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and it carries the marks of that origin: dishes recalled from memory, quantities left vague, and an editor translating French kitchen terms for an English readership. "Dutch sauce" is the old English name for hollandaise, and the name is a genuine puzzle of culinary history rather than a mistranslation here; the sauce is generally traced to France, with the "Holland" in its name usually explained as a reference to Dutch butter, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. What is striking about both sauces on this page is the flour. Adding a roux or a flour-and-water base to an egg-and-butter sauce produces something closer to what French cooks call a sauce bâtarde: less delicate than the restaurant version, but far less likely to break in a home kitchen with an uneven fire.