No. 433

Bearnaise Sauce, Hot Mayonnaise, and with Tomatoes

Sauces Bearnaise, Mayonnaise Chaude et aux Tomates

Put into a saucepan one gill of vinegar with two ounces of chopped shallots, also a few tarragon leaves; cover the saucepan with its lid, and reduce the liquid almost completely, then take it from off the fire. Let the vinegar get slightly cold, and afterward mix in with it four raw egg-yolks, season with salt and mignonette, and return it to a slow fire, and then incorporate into it slowly three ounces of clarified butter, stirring it continually in the meanwhile with a small whip; now strain it through a tammy; whip it well, and mix in with it a coffeespoonful of chopped tarragon, and the same quantity of chopped parsley. This sauce should have the consistency of a mayonnaise, and can also be made the same as the above, with half butter and half oil.

Hot Mayonnaise.—Is made the same as a bearnaise, only using oil and suppressing the tarragon.

Hot Mayonnaise with Tomatoes.—Pour one quart of hot mayonnaise in a deep saucepan, set it either on a slow fire or in a bain-marie, and when it begins to curdle, take it off and beat it up quickly, adding a little cold water; continue the beating process until perfectly smooth, then heat it again stirring vigorously without allowing it to boil, and finish by adding eight tablespoonfuls of well reduced tomato puree (No. 730), four tablespoonfuls of melted meat glaze (No. 401), and some lemon juice. Strain through a fine sieve, then mix in a teaspoonful of chopped parsley and a little cold water.

← No. 432 Bavaroise Sauce Hot Sauces No. 434 Berchoux Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's béarnaise is built exactly as a modern one is, but the vocabulary and the butter ratio belong to 1894. Read the heat instructions as the whole of the technique: everything else is seasoning.

The hinge: never let it boilThe yolks and vinegar go over a slow fire, and the butter goes in slowly enough that the sauce thickens rather than scrambles. A bain-marie or a bowl over barely simmering water gives you the control the original assumes from a coal range; pull it off the heat the moment it thickens to a coating consistency.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Reduced "almost completely" with two ounces of shallots, that leaves you a moist shallot paste with a spoonful of syrupy vinegar, which is the point.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked pepper, usually white or a white-and-black mix; the name is generally said to come from the resemblance of the cracked grains to mignonette seed. Cracked rather than ground matters here because the sauce is strained.
TammyA worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois or a sieve does the same job; the chopped herbs go in after straining, not before.
Butter ratioThree ounces of butter to four yolks is lean by current practice, where six to eight ounces per three yolks is normal. Expect a sharp, light, distinctly vinegary sauce rather than a rich one.
Clarified butterWorth following here. Whole butter carries water and milk solids that will thin a sauce this lightly buttered.
CoffeespoonfulSomewhere between a half and a full teaspoon, depending on whose table you follow. Herb quantities here are forgiving.
Meat glazeRanhofer's No. 401 is brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold, closest today to a good demi-glace or a commercial veal glace. Four tablespoons of it in the tomato version is what makes the sauce taste of the kitchen rather than of tomato.
Scale of the tomato versionA quart of hot mayonnaise is restaurant quantity, on the order of sixteen yolks. For a household batch, work from the tomato and glaze proportions rather than the quart: about two tablespoons of reduced puree and one of glaze per cup of sauce.
YieldThe base recipe makes a scant cup, enough for six portions of grilled beef, fish or asparagus.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's entry from The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of some three decades cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it catches sauce nomenclature mid-settlement. B aally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name honoring Henri IV, who came from B n; the story is traditional rather than documented. What is more revealing is Ranhofer's "hot mayonnaise" — an emulsion built exactly like the b naise but with oil, which a later kitchen would more likely have called an oil-based hollandaise. After Escoffier's Guide Culinaire of 1903 the profession increasingly treated mayonnaise as strictly cold and hollandaise and b naise as the warm emulsions, and the term "mayonnaise chaude" fell out of use. The tomato variant, finished with reduced puree, meat glaze and lemon, is the sort of layered restaurant sauce Delmonico's built its reputation on, drawing preparations from elsewhere in the book into one.