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Bearnaise Sauce
Beat the yolks of five eggs in a saucepan, and add one tablespoonful of butter and one pinch of salt; stir the eggs over a slow fire until they commence to thicken; then remove them and stir in two more tablespoonfuls of butter; continue stirring at the side of the fire until the butter is dissolved. Season the sauce with some chopped fine herbs and parsley, and pour in one teaspoonful of French vinegar. The sauce is then ready for serving.
This is a very compressed béarnaise — Oscar assumes a cook who already knows how a warm egg emulsion behaves. The whole recipe hinges on heat control, so read that point first.
- The hinge: gentle, indirect heatFive yolks will scramble in seconds over direct flame. Work in a heavy saucepan set over a pan of barely simmering water, or lift the pan on and off the burner, and stop the moment the yolks thicken to the consistency of loose cream. Oscar's "at the side of the fire" describes the cooler edge of a coal range; a double boiler is the modern equivalent.
- "Fine herbs"fines herbes conventionally meant parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil; Oscar names parsley separately here. For a recognisable béarnaise, make tarragon the dominant note — roughly a tablespoon chopped, plus the parsley called for.
- "French vinegar"A white wine vinegar. A teaspoonful is the barest acid seasoning, and you may well want a tablespoon or more; the classic method reduces the vinegar with chopped shallot and tarragon stems first, then strains it in. Oscar skips the reduction entirely, which is why his sauce reads closer to a herbed hollandaise.
- Butter quantityThree tablespoons of butter to five yolks is a very yolk-heavy sauce by modern standards — thick, almost custardy. A present-day béarnaise on this many yolks would take 8 to 12 tablespoons, whisked in a little at a time; add it gradually whichever total you choose.
- Salt and finishingOne pinch for five yolks is light. Season at the end, once the butter is in, and add a little cayenne or white pepper if you want the usual profile.
- If it breaksOverheated yolks curdle and the sauce separates. Pull it off the heat at once and whisk in a spoonful of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it drop by drop.
- Holding and yieldThis makes roughly half a cup — enough for about four portions of grilled steak. Warm emulsions split if chilled or held hot for long; keep it barely lukewarm and serve within the hour.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name nodding to Béarn, the birthplace of Henri IV, rather than to any regional cooking of the southwest. By the time Oscar Tschirky was overseeing the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the twentieth century, it was standard equipment in an American luxury hotel kitchen, often sent out with grilled beef — the tournedos and planked steaks that filled those menus. The terseness here is characteristic of the book: Oscar was writing for professional cooks and confident housekeepers who needed the proportions and the sequence, not an explanation of what an emulsion is. The absence of the tarragon-vinegar reduction, now considered the defining step, is a reminder that classical sauce recipes were still fluid in print in the 1890s, before Escoffier's Guide Culinaire of 1903.