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Hollandaise Sauce
This is one of the best sauces for fish: one-half cup of butter; one-half cup of boiling water; one-half lemon (juice only); one-fourth saltspoon of pepper; one saltspoon of salt; three eggs (yolks only). Beat the butter to a cream with a silver spoon, add the yolks of the eggs, one at a time, and beat well; then add the lemon juice, salt and pepper. About five minutes before serving, add the boiling water, a little at a time, stirring well. Place the bowl in a saucepan of boiling water, and stir rapidly until the sauce thickens like boiled custard.
A creamed-butter hollandaise rather than the melted-butter emulsion most cooks learn today, but the mechanics are the same: egg yolk holding butterfat in suspension, set gently over water. The instruction that matters is the last one — the sauce must thicken over hot water, never over direct heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the recipe wants a scant 1/4 teaspoon salt and a pinch (about 1/16 teaspoon) of pepper — season to taste at the end instead.
- Silver spoonThe usual explanation is that a non-reactive utensil was wanted; bare iron or tin could discolour an acidic egg sauce. Any stainless, silicone or wooden spoon does the job now, and a small whisk does it faster.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. It must be genuinely soft to cream, so leave it out an hour first; cold butter will not take up the yolks. Unsalted is the better choice given the added salt.
- The boiling waterAdd it in a thin trickle, whisking constantly. Poured in at once it will shock the yolks and split the sauce before it ever reaches the pan.
- Heat and donenessSet the bowl over — not in — barely simmering water so the base is not touching the liquid, and keep it moving. The sauce is done at about 160-175F, when it coats a spoon like a thin custard. Past roughly 180F the yolks scramble.
- If it splitsPull the bowl off the heat immediately and whisk in a tablespoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Holding itHollandaise will not wait long. Keep it near a warm stove, covered, for no more than 30 minutes; it cannot be reheated, and it should not be held warm for hours.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups, enough for four to six servings of poached or baked fish.
Hollandaise means simply "Dutch sauce," a name generally traced to the French practice of labelling rich butter-and-egg preparations after the Low Countries, long famous for their butter; French cooks had a sauce à la hollandaise well before it became a fixture of the English-language repertoire. By the turn of the twentieth century hollandaise had crossed from restaurant kitchens into the American middle-class household manual, where it stood as an accompaniment to boiled or baked fish beside the plainer drawn-butter sauces. The creamed-butter method given here, rather than the more familiar technique of whisking melted butter into warm yolks, is found in other period cookbooks.