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Hollandaise Sauce
Beat half a tea-cup butter in a bowl to a cream, add yolks of two eggs, one by one, then juice of half a lemon, a pinch of cayenne pepper, half a tea-spoon salt; place this in a sauce-pan of boiling water, beat with an egg beater, for a minute or two, until it begins to thicken, then add one-half cup of boiling water, beating all the time. When like soft custard it is done. It will take five minutes to cook if the bowl is thin and the water boils all the time.
A creamed-butter hollandaise rather than the melted-butter emulsion most cooks know, and it behaves well precisely because the fat starts soft rather than hot. The whole method hinges on gentle, indirect heat.
- The hinge: indirect heat onlyThe recipe sets the bowl into a saucepan of boiling water rather than over direct flame; a thin bowl and steadily boiling water are what the writer specifies. Keep beating throughout, since the yolks will scramble and the sauce break if any part of the bowl gets ahead of the rest.
- Tea-cup measuresA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so half a tea-cup of butter is roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons. The recipe switches to "cup" for the boiling water at the end without defining either measure.
- Cream the butter properlyBeat the butter to a pale, aerated cream before any yolk goes in, and have it at cool room temperature, not melted. Melted butter here gives you a greasy sauce that will not hold.
- Yolks one at a timeThe recipe is specific about adding the yolks singly, and the usual reason given is that a gradual addition lets the emulsion take hold before more liquid goes in.
- TimingFive minutes is the writer's own figure, and it is conditioned on a thin bowl and water that boils continuously; a heavier bowl will take longer. Stop the moment it thickens to the soft custard the recipe describes and lift the bowl off the heat.
- If it breaksTake it off the heat at the first sign of graininess and whisk in a tablespoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Yield and holdingMakes about a cup, enough for four to six servings of asparagus, salmon or poached eggs. It will not survive reheating; hold it in the bowl over water that has been taken off the boil, and use it within half an hour.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt is generous for about a cup of sauce if you are using salted butter. Note that the recipe adds it at the beginning, with the lemon and cayenne, rather than adjusting at the end.
Hollandaise takes its name from the Dutch, and is generally traced to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French fashion for butter-and-egg sauces served with fish and boiled vegetables, one of which was long called sauce à la hollandaise. That it appears among the catsups and sauces shows how thoroughly the French repertoire had been absorbed into ambitious late nineteenth-century home cooking. The version here creams cold butter with the yolks rather than dribbling in warm butter, and is markedly more forgiving on a wood range where heat could not be turned down; the recipe closes with a note about the thinness of the bowl and the steadiness of the boil.