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Sauce Bearnaise
Four small, sound, peeled and finely chopped shallots, one branch very fresh, chopped tarragon, two tablespoons good white-wine vinegar, two raw egg yolks, two and a half ounces hot fresh melted butter and one teaspoon freshly crushed white or black whole pepper.
Place shallots, tarragon, vinegar and pepper in a small saucepan and reduce on a slow fire to one-half the quantity. Press it through a napkin into another small saucepan. Add the two egg yolks, briskly mix with the whisk, with the pan on the corner of the range, for four minutes, without allowing to boil. Gradually add the hot melted butter, continually mixing meanwhile and keeping the pan on the corner of the range. Season with a saltspoon salt and half a saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well again for a minute. Add half teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Mix well and serve as directed.
A classic emulsion sauce written for a coal range, where gentle indirect heat was a matter of moving the pan a few inches. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the yolks below the point where they scramble.
- "On the corner of the range"On a wood or coal stove the corner was the cool zone. Use the lowest gas flame, a heat diffuser, or a bowl over barely simmering water — the sauce should never exceed about 160-170F, and never bubble.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne. The cayenne is assertive at that ratio; add it in two stages and taste.
- Butter quantityTwo and a half ounces of butter is 5 tablespoons, a scant two-thirds of a stick. That is a lean ratio by modern standards — about 1 1/4 oz of butter per yolk, where modern recipes commonly use two to four times that — so the finished sauce is sharper and thinner.
- "One branch" of tarragonRead this as one good sprig, roughly a tablespoon of chopped leaves. Fresh tarragon is not optional here; dried tarragon in a reduction turns dusty and flat.
- Straining through a napkinA fine-mesh sieve does the job, pressing hard on the solids to get all the liquid. The point is to remove the shallot, herb stems and cracked pepper so the finished sauce is smooth — the coarsely crushed peppercorns are for flavor in the reduction only.
- The reductionTwo tablespoons of vinegar reduced by half leaves very little liquid, and it can scorch in seconds in a small pan. Watch it, and if you lose too much add a spoonful of water to the strained liquid before whisking in the yolks.
- If it splitsPull the pan off the heat immediately and whisk in a teaspoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and whisk the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time. Overheated yolks that have visibly scrambled cannot be saved.
- Yield and holdingAbout half a cup, enough for four steaks. Serve within the half hour, held somewhere merely warm — a thermos or a bowl over tepid water. It cannot be reheated.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, in the 1830s or 1840s, the name honoring Henri IV of Navarre, who came from Béarn — a piece of etymology that is repeated everywhere but rests on tradition rather than documents. What is not in doubt is the structure: a vinegar-and-shallot reduction standing in for the lemon of a hollandaise, with tarragon as the defining flavor. By the time this book appeared, béarnaise had become one of the small handful of sauces an American hotel or club cook was simply expected to produce on demand, chiefly for grilled beef, and its inclusion here reflects the professional French kitchen vocabulary that such books were transmitting to English-speaking readers. The instruction to work "on the corner of the range" dates the text as precisely as anything in it — a solid-fuel stove offered a gradient of heat across its top, and knowing where to stand a pan was a skill in itself.