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Hollandaise Sauce
½ cup butter 4 egg yolks 6 tablespoonfuls boil- 1 tablespoonful lemoning water juice or vinegar Salt and cayenne Cream the butter, add egg yolks, and stir vigorously. Then add lemon-juice, seasoning, and water. Beat five minutes with Dover egg beater.
Cook over hot water, and continue to stir until thickened.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as ½ cup butter, 4 egg yolks, 6 tablespoons boiling water, 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar, salt and cayenne. This is the creamed-butter method of hollandaise rather than the melted-butter emulsion most cooks use now.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerThe double boiler's water should steam, not bubble, and the bowl should not touch it. Yolks begin to set around 150-160F; much past that they scramble and the sauce breaks.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard American kitchen tool from the 1870s onward. A balloon whisk or a hand mixer on low does the same work in less than the five minutes specified.
- Cream the butter properlyThe butter must be soft enough to beat to a pale paste before the yolks go in — about 65F. Cold butter will not take up the yolks and the sauce starts out broken.
- Boiling water, measuredThe 6 tablespoons of boiling water are the bulk of the liquid, alongside the tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, and may be part of why this version holds together comparatively well. Add it in a thin stream while beating, not all at once.
- If it curdlesPull it off the heat at once and beat 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.
- Yield and holdingMakes roughly a cup and a quarter, enough for four to six servings. Hollandaise will not reheat; hold it up to half an hour in a warm bowl over water off the heat, and never over direct flame.
- With the left-over poultryServing -- The recipe as printed gives no serving suggestion; a sauce of this kind suits cold sliced chicken or turkey rewarmed gently, or creamed poultry on toast. Warm the meat through before saucing, since the sauce cannot be heated once it is on the plate.
Hollandaise belongs to the French sauce repertoire and is well established under that name by the nineteenth century. The name is usually explained as a nod to Dutch butter rather than to any Dutch dish, but that is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. The sauce was familiar in American household cookery books by the time this one was printed, and the creamed-butter version given here — butter beaten soft first, yolks and boiling water worked in, then set over hot water — is commonly said to be more forgiving than pouring melted butter into yolks.