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Sauce Remi
Prepare a Bearnaise sauce and add a half teaspoon very fresh, freshly chopped leaves of mint and six sliced, stoned olives. Gently mix with a spoon and use as required.
A finishing sauce built on Béarnaise, which the book assumes you already know how to make. Everything depends on that base being stable before anything goes into it.
- The base is the whole jobBéarnaise is a reduction of vinegar, shallot and tarragon whisked into egg yolks over gentle heat, then let down with warm butter. Keep the yolks below about 160F and off direct heat; if they scramble or the butter goes in too fast the sauce breaks and no amount of mint will rescue it.
- Hold it warm, not hotAn emulsified butter sauce sits happily at 120-140F for an hour or so. Above that it separates, in the refrigerator it sets solid, and reheating rarely works. Make it close to service.
- "Stoned" olivesPitted. Six olives sliced gives roughly a tablespoon. The recipe does not say what kind of olive; if brine-packed ones are used, rinse and blot them so the brine does not thin the sauce.
- Mint quantityHalf a teaspoon of chopped mint is a whisper against a batch of butter sauce. Taste and go up cautiously; the recipe does not say which mint.
- Chop at the last minuteThe insistence on "very fresh, freshly chopped" is practical. Bruised mint turns dark and grassy in a warm fat-based sauce within minutes.
- Mix, do not whiskFolding with a spoon is deliberate. Vigorous whisking of a finished Béarnaise, especially with hard solids in it, encourages the emulsion to split.
- Yield and useA standard Béarnaise on three yolks and a cup of butter makes roughly 1 1/4 cups. The recipe says only "use as required"; the mint and olive point towards grilled lamb or steak.
- Raw-yolk noteThe yolks are cooked, but only just. If serving anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized eggs.
Béarnaise belongs to the standard French repertoire that this book treats as common knowledge and then varies endlessly by adding a garnish and a new name. Dozens of such derivative sauces circulated in professional kitchens around 1900, many christened after a patron, a hotel or a chef; no documented origin for the name "Remi" is known. What the combination signals is a lamb sauce: mint with lamb was thoroughly English by this date, and grafting it onto a French butter emulsion with a Mediterranean olive is exactly the kind of cross-border tinkering the book goes in for.