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Golden Sauce
3 tablespoons butter. 3 tablespoons flour. 1 1/2 cups milk. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper 2 egg yolks 1 teaspoon lemon juice or vinegar Make sauce of first three ingredients, salt and pepper. Beat egg yolks slightly and just before serving, add sauce and heat. Add lemon juice and serve at once.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the "first three ingredients" it refers to have dropped out of the printing. Everything about the method says this is a thin white sauce enriched with yolks, the standard turn-of-the-century "mock hollandaise" served over boiled vegetables.
- The missing three ingredientsRead against other books of the period, the base is butter, flour and milk in the usual proportions for a thin white sauce — roughly 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to 1 cup milk. That reconstruction is inference, not what the page says, so treat the quantities as your own judgment rather than the book's.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer. Egg yolk proteins set around 150-160F and will curdle into grains if the pan reaches boiling. "Heat" here means warm through for a minute or two, off direct high heat or over hot water.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks slightly, then whisk a ladleful of the hot sauce into them before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight into hot sauce is how this dish fails.
- Salt and pepper amountsThe printed "teaspoon salt, teaspoon pepper" almost certainly stands for fractions lost in typesetting. A quarter teaspoon of salt and a pinch of pepper suits a cup of sauce; a full teaspoon of pepper would be inedible.
- Acid last, and for a reasonLemon juice or vinegar goes in at the end, after the sauce has been heated, which is the book's own order; the page does not say to take the pan off the heat first. Acid added early can encourage the milk proteins and yolks to tighten and separate; added at the end it mainly brightens the flavor.
- Yield and servingThe reconstructed proportions give about a cup, enough for four servings of asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli or green beans. It does not hold or reheat — the book's "serve at once" is literal.
Golden sauce is the thrifty cousin of hollandaise: instead of whisking a great deal of butter into yolks over water, a cook made a flour-thickened white sauce, enriched it with two yolks and sharpened it with lemon or vinegar. The result is stable, cheap, and forgiving of a distracted cook, and versions of it appear under names like mock hollandaise and Dutch sauce in American household manuals, mostly an early twentieth-century usage. Its presence in a Metropolitan Life cook book — one of the free booklets insurance companies handed out through their agents as a goodwill and public-health gesture — fits that literature exactly: these books favored milk, eggs and vegetables, and taught sauces that would make a plate of boiled cauliflower worth eating without the expense or the technique of a French kitchen.