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Hollandaise Sauce II
1/2 cup butter ½ tablespoon vinegar or 1 tablespoon lemon juice Yolks 2 eggs ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne.
Fannie Farmer gives this as a variant on her first hollandaise, so the quantities stand alone without a method attached. The proportions are sound: 1/2 cup butter (1 stick, 4 oz) to two yolks and an acid.
- The salt quantityThe salt is printed as "14 teaspoon," which is not a usable amount; it is almost certainly a mis-scan of 1/4 teaspoon, which suits 1/2 cup of butter.
- AcidThe recipe allows either 1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar or 1 tablespoon lemon juice. A cider or white wine vinegar will give a milder result than distilled white vinegar.
- Butter temperatureNo method is printed with these quantities. Cold butter cut into three or four pieces and added gradually is the more forgiving approach, and matches the older hollandaise technique.
- The hinge: gentle heatYolks begin to thicken around 150F and are set by roughly 158F. Work over hot, not boiling, water and pull the pan off the heat whenever the sauce steams at the edges. Once the yolks curdle no amount of whisking recovers them.
- If it breaksA separated sauce can usually be brought back by whisking it slowly into a fresh yolk, or into a spoonful of hot water, in a clean warm bowl.
- EggsThe yolks are only lightly cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised.
- Yield and holdingAbout 3/4 cup, enough for four to six servings of poached salmon, boiled fish or asparagus. Hollandaise will not sit on the stove or reheat; hold it barely warm in a covered bowl for no more than half an hour.
Hollandaise reached American cookbooks by way of French professional kitchens, where it was long counted among the mother sauces; the name is generally traced to an older Dutch-style butter-and-egg sauce for fish rather than to any Dutch recipe in particular. That Farmer prints two versions at all suggests how firmly the sauce had settled into turn-of-the-century American cooking. The alternative of vinegar for lemon juice is a practical marker of the period, when a household's lemon supply could not be assumed year-round.