No. 474

Green Hollandaise Sauce

Sauce Hollandaise Verte

Set into a saucepan five tablespoonfuls of flour, one tablespoonful of pepper corns, some thyme and bay leaves. Dilute this with a pint of water and boil while stirring so as to make a thick but smooth paste; cook it on a very slow fire for fifteen minutes, then take it off, let it get slightly cold, and add ten egg-yolks, afterward the butter and water, a very little at the time; using in all about two pounds of fresh butter and half a pound of ravigote butter, the juice of three lemons or simply a spoonful of vinegar; color with spinach green, and if too thick, thin it out with water, then strain through a tammy and keep it in a bain-marie at a moderate heat.

← No. 473 Green Sauce Hot Sauces No. 475 Grimod Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a flour-bound hollandaise built for a hotel kitchen: the roux-like base makes it far more stable than the classic emulsion, but the quantities are enormous and two of the ingredients are themselves recipes elsewhere in the book.

Scale it down firstTwo pounds of butter, half a pound of compound butter, ten yolks and a pint of water yields roughly two quarts of sauce — banquet quantities. A tenth of the recipe (one yolk, about 3 oz butter plus a scant ounce of ravigote butter, 3 tablespoons water, 1 1/2 teaspoons flour) behaves the same way.
The hinge: temperature when the yolks go inThe instruction to let the paste "get slightly cold" is the whole recipe. Yolks stirred into a hot starch base scramble in streaks that no straining will fix. Bring it down to roughly blood heat before the yolks, then add the butter in small additions.
Ravigote butterA compound butter from elsewhere in The Epicurean: tarragon, chervil, chives, cress and burnet blanched, pounded smooth, worked into butter and pressed through a sieve. There is no substitute sold ready-made; make it, or fold finely chopped blanched herbs into softened butter and accept a coarser texture.
Spinach greenVert d'épinards — spinach juice heated until the pigment coagulates, then collected in a cloth and used as a paste. It colors without flavoring. A few drops of modern green food coloring do the same job less honestly; blanched spinach puréed and pressed does it properly.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, worked by twisting the sauce through between two people. A chinois lined with a double layer of damp muslin, pressed with a ladle, gets you there. Straining is not optional here: the peppercorns, thyme and bay stay whole in the base and come out at this step.
The base cookingFifteen minutes over very low heat is to cook out the raw starch, not to reduce. Stir and use a heat diffuser or a double boiler; a pint of water to five tablespoons of flour scorches easily once it thickens.
AcidThe juice of three lemons or "simply a spoonful of vinegar" are not equivalent at this scale — the lemon is far more acid and far more flavor. Add either at the end, off the heat, and taste as you go rather than committing all of it.
HoldingA bain-marie at "moderate heat" means the water is hot but never simmering; the book gives no temperature. A sauce like this is held warm for long stretches, so keep it genuinely hot, hold it no more than a couple of hours, and do not reheat leftovers.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for what is usually summed as about thirty years, though his tenure there was interrupted, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's service manual, which is why a hollandaise here is built to survive a long evening on the steam table rather than to be whisked to order. The flour base is the tell: a starch-stabilized hollandaise resists breaking and can be held, thinned and re-strained, unlike the unthickened emulsion that French classical practice had settled on. The green comes from two directions at once ℇ ravigote butter for herb flavor, spinach green for color — a division of labor typical of the period, when a sauce was expected to look emphatically like its name. Green sauces of this family were served chiefly with poached fish and shellfish, and the entry sits in the book among a long run of numbered hot sauces that a cook was expected to work from by reference, not by reading through.