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Chicken Hollandaise
1 teaspoon finely chopped onion. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1½ tablespoons butter 1/3 cup finely chopped celery Few grains paprika 1 cup cold cooked chicken, cut in small cubes Yolk-1 egg 2 tablespoons corn-starch 1 cup chicken stock 1 teaspoon lemon juice Cook butter and onion five minutes, add corn-starch and stock gradually. Add lemon juice, celery, salt, paprika, and chicken; when well heated, add yolk of egg slightly beaten, and cook one minute. Serve with buttered Graham toast.
A creamed-chicken sauce built on cornstarch rather than a roux, thickened at the end with egg yolk. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before starting.
- The missing onionThe method says to cook butter and onion five minutes, but no onion appears in the list. Use about a tablespoon of finely chopped onion or shallot, softened in the butter without colour. Salt is likewise called for only in the method; season to taste.
- Not a hollandaiseDespite the name, there is no emulsion of butter and yolk here. This is a lemon-sharpened velouté finished with a single yolk as liaison, which is why it holds together far more easily than the sauce it is named for.
- The hinge: the yolkOnce the yolk goes in, the sauce must not boil. Take the pan off direct heat, temper the beaten yolk with a spoonful of the hot sauce, stir it back, and return to low heat for no more than a minute. A boil curdles it into threads.
- Cornstarch quantityTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to one cup of stock gives a very stiff sauce by current taste, closer to a moulded pudding than a nappe. One tablespoon per cup produces a coating consistency; increase from there if you want it spoonable rather than pourable.
- Chicken stockPeriod stock was generally made from bones and trimmings and tended to be more gelatinous than modern commercial broth, which is thinner and already salty. Hold back on added salt until the sauce is finished and taste it then.
- Graham toastGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted and including the bran and germ. Any decent whole-wheat bread, toasted and buttered, serves the same purpose: a sturdy base that will not collapse under a thick sauce.
- YieldOne cup of chicken and one cup of stock makes two modest servings over toast, or four as part of a larger lunch. The dish does not reheat well once the yolk is in.
This belongs to the large family of creamed-chicken dishes that filled the leftover-and-luncheon pages of American cookbooks around 1900 — chicken à la king, chicken croquettes, chicken timbales, all built from cold cooked bird and a bound sauce. The chicken here is specified as cold and already cooked. The name reflects a period habit of borrowing French sauce names loosely; "hollandaise" in this context signals only the lemon and the egg yolk, not the classic butter emulsion. Graham toast under it is a distinctly American touch, the whole-wheat flour named for Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer whose advocacy of unbolted flour had by 1900 settled into an ordinary pantry staple rather than a cause.