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Hollandaise Sauce
1/2 cup butter 2 egg yolks 1/4 teaspoon salt teaspoon salt Sprinkle of cayenne 1 tablespoon lemon juice Mash the butter, divide in three pieces. Put one piece in a pan with the egg yolks and lemon juice and cook over hot water, stirring constantly with wire whisk. Don't let water touch pan or egg will cook too quickly. As the sauce thickens, add the second piece of butter, then the third. Remove from fire, add seasoning. One tablespoon of cream added helps to keep the sauce from separating. 8 stalks mint, or 2 tablespoons dry mint
The text as printed is a fragment: the head of the ingredient list has been lost, so the butter and egg yolk quantities are missing, and the trailing mint line belongs to a different recipe on the same page. The method itself is standard, and workable if you supply proportions from the usual ratio.
- Missing quantitiesOnly the salt, cayenne and lemon juice survive. A common working ratio for a sauce using 1 tablespoon of lemon juice is about 3 egg yolks to 1/2 cup (4 oz) butter, which also divides neatly into the three pieces the method calls for; the original figures cannot be recovered from this page.
- "Cook over hot water"This means a double boiler or a bowl set over a saucepan. The instruction that the water must not touch the pan is the hinge of the recipe: direct contact overheats the base and scrambles the yolks before the emulsion forms.
- Water temperatureKeep the water hot but below a simmer, roughly 180F. If it boils, the sauce will be at the mercy of the steam rather than the burner.
- Butter in three piecesMashing the butter and adding it in thirds is a deliberate brake on the heat: each addition drops the temperature of the pan and buys stirring time. "Mash" implies softened, not melted, butter.
- "Remove from fire"Off the heat. The recipe adds the salt and cayenne at the end, which lets you season the finished sauce to taste.
- The tablespoon of creamSound advice, and worth taking. The added liquid and milk solids give the emulsion more margin before it breaks. A teaspoon of cold water whisked in will also pull back a sauce that is starting to separate.
- Doneness and holdingThe sauce is done when it coats the whisk and leaves a trail. Do not assume that point corresponds to a safe temperature for the yolks; it may not. Serve soon after making, held warm but not hot, as it reheats badly.
- The stray mint line"8 stalks mint, or 2 tablespoons dry mint" is the head of some other recipe on the same page and has nothing to do with the hollandaise. Ignore it here.
- YieldWith the proportions above, about 3/4 cup, enough for four servings of poached eggs, asparagus or cold poultry.
Hollandaise takes its name from Holland, and the connection is traditional rather than documented: French cookery had a sauce à la hollandaise long before the modern butter-and-yolk emulsion settled into its present form, and the older versions were often flour-thickened. The practical note about a spoonful of cream is exactly the sort of insurance a home cook wants when working over an uncertain stove rather than with a brigade at hand.