No. 477

Hollandaise Sauce and Hollandaise Mousseline Sauce

Sauce Hollandaise et Sauce Hollandaise Mousseline

Reduce half a gill of vinegar into which a coffeespoonful of white pepper corns has been added; remove it from the fire, and pour in about half a gill of cold water, five egg-yolks, two ounces of butter, salt, and grated nutmeg; set this saucepan into a larger one containing boiling water, or simply on a very slow fire; stir the contents constantly with a wire-egg beater, and as soon as the sauce becomes consistent add fresh butter divided into small pats, until six ounces have been consumed; squeeze in the juice of one lemon, more or less, according to taste, and if the sauce be too thick add a little more water to it; then strain it through a tammy (No. 159), pour it in the vessel described in Fig. 171, put it in a bain-marie not too hot, then stir it again constantly for a few minutes and serve.

Hollandaise Mousseline.—Reduce one gill of vinegar, with a few grains of pepper; take it off the fire, and when the liquid is nearly cold mix in with it five egg-yolks, beating them well with a wire whip, then add five ounces of fresh butter, salt, and nutmeg; set the saucepan over a slow fire, stir the preparation rapidly until the butter is melted, then strain the sauce through a sieve or tammy into another saucepan; set this one into another containing boiling water and keep it on the side of the range, working the sauce incessantly until it is thick and frothy, adding little by little a quarter of a pound of butter, and one pint of well-drained whipped cream; it is now ready to be served.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's hollandaise is built on a reduced vinegar base rather than the wine-and-shallot reduction most cooks use now, and it carries far more butter per yolk than a modern ratio. The points below translate the measures and the equipment.

Gills and coffeespoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of vinegar is 4 tablespoons and one gill is half a cup. A coffeespoonful is roughly half a teaspoon of peppercorns.
What "reduce" means hereThe vinegar is meant to cook down to a small amount of concentrated liquid before the cold water goes in, though Ranhofer does not say how far. The reduction is what keeps the finished sauce from tasting sharp despite the volume of vinegar.
Butter totalsThe first sauce uses 2 oz at the start plus 6 oz added in pats, half a pound in all on that reading, though the text could also mean six ounces of butter in total; either way it is set against five yolks. The mousseline uses 5 oz plus a further quarter pound.
Heat is the hingeEverything depends on holding the yolks below the point where they set. Keep the bowl or pan over water that is barely trembling, not at a rolling boil, and pull it off the heat the moment the whisk leaves tracks. For holding, Ranhofer specifies only a "bain-marie not too hot"; he gives no temperature.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting the ends. A fine-mesh conical strainer does the same job, and here it removes the peppercorns and any strands of set yolk.
The vessel in Fig. 171The text simply refers the reader to an illustrated vessel for holding the sauce in the water bath; its form is not described in the recipe itself. A stainless bowl over warm water, covered, serves the same purpose.
Mousseline: fold, do not cookMousseline: the cream -- Ranhofer adds the whipped cream, little by little, while the sauce is still being worked over the pan of boiling water; modern practice folds it in off the heat instead. Either way, mousseline cannot be reheated or held long; it separates and deflates.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) records that kitchen's practice at banquet scale, which is why five yolks and half a pound of butter is treated as a single unremarkable batch. The name hollandaise is often said, by tradition rather than firm evidence, to come from French cooks' habit of labelling butter-and-egg preparations "Dutch," the Netherlands having been a byword for butter; earlier French sources sometimes called much the same thing sauce Isigny after the Normandy butter town. Ranhofer's vinegar reduction places him closer to the nineteenth-century French tradition than to the lemon-forward version standardised later by Escoffier. The mousseline variant is lightened with whipped cream.