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Maître D'Hôtel Sauce
2 cups drawn-butter sauce
2 egg-yolks
1 tablespoon lemon-juice
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Add the lemon-juice and chopped parsley to the drawn-butter sauce. Let it cool slightly, add the beaten yolks and season with salt and pepper. Do not permit the sauce to boil after the addition of the egg-yolk.
A short finishing sauce built on an older American base sauce that no longer appears on ingredient lists. The whole thing hinges on temperature control at the end.
- Drawn-butter sauceNot simply melted butter. In American cookery of this period it usually means a butter sauce thickened with flour: butter cooked with flour, hot water whisked in (some versions use a light fish stock), simmered smooth and often finished with more butter. The book gives no proportions here, so the quantities needed to make up 2 cups are a matter of reconstruction; period recipes vary.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, keep the sauce well below a boil. A boil can scramble the yolks into visible threads and break the sauce; the starch in the flour base does give some protection.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe says only to let the sauce cool slightly before the beaten yolks go in. Whisking a ladleful of the hot sauce into the yolks first is a later safeguard rather than what the text describes.
- Lemon lastLemon -- Acid added to a hot flour-thickened sauce can thin it slightly. As written, the juice and parsley go in before the yolks; whether that order was chosen for that reason is not stated.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; chop it fine. The recipe stirs it into the sauce with the lemon juice, before the yolks, so it gets little cooking and keeps its colour.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups. The recipe gives no number of servings. Sauces of this kind were served with poached or broiled fish, boiled chicken and plain vegetables.
- Holding itKeep it warm over hot, not simmering, water and whisk occasionally. It will not reheat well from cold once the yolks are in.
Maître d'hôtel means the head of the house or hotel dining room, and the name attached itself in French cookery to the simplest good treatment of plain fish and meat: butter, lemon and parsley. In classical French practice “maître d'hôtel” is usually a compound butter — softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, sliced cold onto a grilled steak or fillet. Some American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned it instead into a pourable sauce by borrowing the same flavourings and folding them into drawn butter, the workhorse fish sauce of the period, with egg yolks for richness and body, though the compound butter appears in American books of the period too.