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Sauce Figaro
To Hollandaise Sauce II add two tablespoons tomato purée (tomatoes stewed, strained, and cooked until reduced to a thick pulp), one teaspoon finely chopped parsley, and a few grains cayenne.
Horseradish Sauce I 3 tablespoons grated horseradish root 1 tablespoon vinegar ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 4 tablespoons heavy cream Mix first four ingredients, and add cream beaten stiff.
Two cold-kitchen classics squeezed into one entry: a compound hollandaise and a whipped horseradish cream. Both are quick, and both depend on temperature control rather than technique.
- Hollandaise IIThe recipe builds on Farmer's second hollandaise, a numbered base sauce given elsewhere in the book; its method is not repeated here. Any standard hollandaise made with about 1/2 cup butter and two yolks will carry the additions.
- Tomato puréeThe parenthesis is the whole instruction: stewed tomatoes, sieved, then reduced to a thick paste. Canned tomato purée is thinner and more acidic than what is described; reduce it in a small pan for a few minutes so it does not slacken the emulsion. Tomato paste from a tube, thinned slightly, is the closest ready equivalent.
- Keep it warm, not hotThe hinge with any hollandaise is holding it between roughly 120 and 140F. Above that the yolks tighten and the sauce breaks; the added purée gives no protection. Make it within half an hour of serving and hold it off the heat in a warm bowl.
- Cayenne "few grains"Read this as a scant pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon.
- Grated horseradishFresh root, peeled and grated fine on a rasp, is what the recipe means. If you use bottled prepared horseradish, drain it and omit the vinegar, since it is already packed in vinegar; 3 tablespoons drained is about right.
- Heavy creamFour tablespoons is a quarter cup, which whips to roughly half a cup. Whip it to soft-to-firm peaks and fold it into the horseradish mixture rather than stirring, or the acid and salt will deflate it.
- Eggs and yieldEggs -- The hollandaise base is only lightly cooked; use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg.
Sauce Figaro belongs to the French repertoire of "small sauces" -- a mother sauce given a name once it is flavoured a particular way -- and appears in classical manuals as a tomato-and-parsley hollandaise served with poached fish, where the acid and the tomato do the work that a lemon wedge otherwise would. The name is often linked to the fashion for naming dishes after stage characters, but that connection is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in Fannie Farmer alongside a whipped horseradish cream says a good deal about the Boston Cooking School's ambitions: the book was written for American households running without a trained chef, yet it assumed those households would want the French repertoire, broken into steps and cross-referenced back to a numbered base sauce so the cook never had to learn the theory to get the result.