Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Portuguese Sauce
Portuguese Sauce
This sauce should be made a minute or two before it is ready to be served, for if permitted to cool it will be spoiled. Put five or six tablespoonfuls of butter into a saucepan with the yolks of two raw eggs, a small quantity of lemon juice, and a pinch of coarse pepper, and stir over the fire until hot, but do not allow it to boil. Remove the sauce from the fire, and keep on stirring it until thick. It is then ready for serving.
This is a hollandaise in all but name, built without the usual water or reduction, so the yolks have very little to protect them. Everything depends on gentle, constant heat.
- The hinge: never let it boilTwo yolks with that much butter will scramble the moment the pan floor gets past a simmer. Work over a bain-marie or the lowest possible flame, and pull the pan off the heat every few seconds to keep the temperature climbing slowly.
- Quantities in modern termsFive or six tablespoons of butter is about 2 1/2 to 3 oz (70-85 g), enough sauce for two to four servings. "A small quantity of lemon juice" means roughly 1-2 teaspoons; start low, since the acid also helps the emulsion hold.
- Cook the yolks properlyModern practice is to bring an egg-yolk sauce to 160F (71C) on an instant-read thermometer, which is well below boiling and still safe for the emulsion. Below that, use pasteurized eggs or shell eggs pasteurized in the shell, especially if anyone eating is elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- Butter cold, not meltedOscar's method adds the butter to the pan whole. Cut it into small cold cubes and add them a few at a time as the previous ones melt into the yolks -- that staged addition is what makes the sauce thicken rather than separate.
- "Coarse pepper"Most likely coarsely cracked black or white peppercorns; the recipe does not say which. White pepper is the usual choice for a pale sauce; cracked black gives it visible specks, which is fine but changes the look.
- Salt is missingThe original lists none, perhaps because salted butter and a seasoned dish underneath were taken for granted; the text does not say. Taste and salt at the end, off the heat.
- If it breaksTake the pan off the heat immediately, drop in an ice cube or a teaspoon of cold water, and whisk hard. If that fails, start a fresh yolk in a warm bowl and beat the split sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Holding and servingOscar is right that cooling ruins it. Hold no more than 20-30 minutes in a covered bowl set over warm -- not hot -- water, and do not reheat. Serve over poached fish, asparagus, or eggs.
The name covers a family of nineteenth-century restaurant sauces rather than anything Portuguese in origin; classical French kitchens used "portugaise" most often for a tomato-based sauce, while the same word attached itself loosely to other garnishes and emulsions on hotel menus of the period. What Oscar Tschirky sets down here is a hollandaise-type sauce -- yolks, butter, lemon, gentle heat -- of a kind common in American hotel cooking in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The brevity is characteristic of the book: Oscar was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and his instructions read like notes passed between people who already know how an emulsion behaves, which is why the sauce carries no salt, no yield and no temperature, only the warning that it must not boil and must not be left to cool.