Home › Fish And Meat Sauces › French Chef (Wash butter divide in three)
French Chef (Wash butter divide in three)
Wash butter, divide in three pieces; put one piece in a saucepan with vinegar or lemon juice and egg yolks; place saucepan in a larger one containing boiling water, and stir constantly with a wire whisk. Add second piece of butter, and, as it thickens, third piece. Remove from fire, and add salt and cayenne. If left over fire a moment too long it will separate. If a richer sauce is desired, add one-half teaspoon hot water and one-half tablespoon heavy cream.
This is hollandaise by the three-butter method, and the entry assumes you already know the proportions from the recipe above it in the book. Read the failure warning first: it is the whole technique.
- The hingeThe yolks begin to set at around 150F and scramble not far above that. Keep the water in the lower pan hot but not at a rolling boil, lift the upper pan off the heat whenever the sauce starts to grip, and stop the moment it coats the whisk. "A moment too long" is not a figure of speech.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives none. A typical period proportion for this sauce is 1/2 cup butter, 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar, 1/4 teaspoon salt and a few grains cayenne.
- "Wash butter"Working butter in cold water with a wooden spoon or the hands rinsed out surplus buttermilk, which shortened its keeping, along with some of the salt, so the cook could season at the end. With modern sweet cream butter the step is unnecessary; use unsalted and season at the end as directed.
- Three pieces, not melted butterAdding the butter solid and in stages holds the temperature down and gives the emulsion time to take. Pouring in melted butter is a different method, not the one described here.
- "Place saucepan in a larger one"A double boiler, improvised. A stainless or glass bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water works the same way, provided the bowl does not touch the water.
- If it separatesWhisk a teaspoon of cold water, or a fresh yolk, in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time. The recipe gives no rescue instruction.
- Holding and servingHollandaise will not sit on heat and will not reheat. Make it last, keep it in a warm bowl off the stove, and serve within half an hour.
- EggsThe yolks never reach a temperature that reliably pasteurises them. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
Hollandaise is one of the emulsified butter sauces that French cooking codified in the nineteenth century, and its name is generally traced to a Dutch-style butter-and-egg sauce absorbed into the French repertoire rather than to any Dutch original, though the name itself predates that codification. Its appearance here, labelled "French Chef", marks it as a sauce that belonged to trained restaurant cooks, reduced to a sequence a home cook with a double boiler and a wire whisk could follow. The three-stage butter addition and the blunt warning about separating state method and failure mode in the same breath.