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Sauce Trianon
To Hollandaise Sauce II add gradually, while cooking, one and one-half tablespoons Sherry wine.
A one-line derivative sauce of the kind that fills the back pages of Fannie Farmer's fish and meat chapter: a finished hollandaise turned into something else by a single addition. Everything that matters happens in the base sauce.
- The hingeAdd the sherry a few drops at a time off direct heat, beating constantly. Wine is thin and acidic, and poured in at once it will thin the emulsion past the point of recovery or curdle it outright.
- Heat controlKeep the water beneath the bowl at a bare simmer and do not let the sauce get hot; too much heat and it curdles. A sauce that stiffens and looks grainy has scrambled, and beating in a spoonful of hot water hard may bring it back.
- What sherry to useA dry fino or amontillado. Supermarket "cooking sherry" is salted and will push an already-seasoned sauce over the edge; season the base lightly if that is all you have.
- QuantityOne and one-half tablespoons into a two-yolk hollandaise is assertive but not overwhelming. Start with one tablespoon and taste before committing to the rest, since sherries vary widely in sweetness.
- Holding and yieldMakes roughly a cup, enough for about four servings of poached fish or asparagus. Serve it soon after making and keep it barely warm; held long or chilled it is liable to separate.
- What to put it onIt belongs with poached salmon, halibut, sweetbreads or boiled chicken -- mild, moist things that take an enriched sauce without competing with it.
The name is generally taken to refer to the Trianon at Versailles, though the book offers no explanation and the connection is traditional rather than documented. Sherry-fortified butter sauces had a long run in Anglo-American hotel cookery. Its presence in Fannie Farmer's book reflects the Boston Cooking School's project of translating professional French sauce work into a form a household cook with a double boiler could follow: the parent sauce is given once, in detail, and the offshoots are reduced to a single sentence each. That editorial economy is why so many of these entries read as fragments, and why the derivative sauces are useless without the page they refer back to.