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Beefsteak à la Henriette
1/2 cup butter Yolks 3 eggs ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons tomato purée 1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley Few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon cold water 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Wash butter, and divide in three pieces. Put one piece in saucepan with yolks of eggs slightly beaten and mixed with water and lemon juice. Proceed same as in making Hollandaise Sauce I (see p. 274); then add tomato, parsley, and seasonings. Pour one-half sauce on a serving dish, lay a broiled porterhouse steak on sauce, and cover steak with remaining sauce. Garnish with parsley.
A broiled porterhouse served on a tomato-tinted hollandaise, in the manner Fannie Farmer used for most of her compound butter sauces. The sauce is the whole job here; the steak is simply broiled.
- The hinge: three additions of butterDividing the butter in thirds and adding it in stages keeps the yolks from outrunning the fat and breaking. Work over hot, never boiling, water and pull the pan off the heat the moment the sauce thickens to coating consistency.
- "Wash butter"An older step: knead the butter under cold water to press out buttermilk and excess salt, both of which varied in period dairy butter. With modern unsalted butter you can skip it entirely.
- Sauce proportionsThe quantities of butter and egg yolks are not given in this entry; the reader is sent to Hollandaise Sauce I for them. Note that the lemon juice here (1½ tablespoons) is more than the master sauce calls for.
- Tomato puréeRead this as plain sieved tomato, not the thick concentrate sold as tomato paste today. Two tablespoons of canned tomato purée or passata is the right weight; paste would be too strong and would darken the sauce.
- Broiling the porterhouseNo thickness is given. For a steak of around 1½ inches, use very high heat, about 4 inches from the element, roughly 5–7 minutes a side for medium-rare, then a 5-minute rest. Rest it on a rack rather than on the platter so juices do not thin the sauce.
- Timing the two togetherHollandaise will not wait long and will not reheat. Make the sauce while the steak rests, or hold it over water no hotter than about 130°F for a few minutes at most.
- Cayenne and WorcestershireBoth go in at the end, off the heat, as the recipe directs. Worcestershire is both acid and salty, so add it last and taste before any further salt.
- YieldA porterhouse of this kind serves two to three, and the sauce quantity suits that.
Nineteenth-century restaurant cooking passed its sauce names into American cookbooks with the sauces rather than with any fixed story. What this entry really shows is the reach of hollandaise in Fannie Farmer's kitchen: the Boston Cooking-School book teaches one master emulsion and then spins out a long series of variations from it, tomato among them. Serving a broiled steak napped above and below in a butter sauce is a hotel presentation, and its appearance in a school text reflects how far the domestic-science movement borrowed from professional French practice to raise the ambitions of the middle-class table.