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Bearnaise Sauce
1 small onion, sliced, or 2 tablespoons sliced leeks or chopped chives 1/4 cup tarragon vinegar 2 tablespoons water 1 cup white stock 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/4 cup Mazola 3 egg yolks 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Cook the onion and vinegar five minutes. Strain, add the stock and seasonings and the cornstarch stirred smooth with one tablespoon cold water. Stir over hot water until thick, then pour into the egg yolks beaten creamy. Return to the heat and cook until thickened. Beat in the Mazola and serve with fish, with asparagus tips, fillet of beef or smoked pork tenderloin.
A cornstarch-stabilised béarnaise, built on corn oil rather than butter — a house style typical of a corn-products booklet. It behaves more like a thickened velouté with egg than a classic emulsion, which makes it far more forgiving than the real thing.
- The hinge: keep the eggs below a simmerPour the hot thickened stock into the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking, then return it to gentle heat over hot water. If the pan goes above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce turns grainy; the cornstarch buys you margin but does not eliminate the risk.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock of veal or chicken bones. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark brown stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- MazolaCorn oil, then and now. It contributes no flavour, which is the point of the booklet but also the weakness of the sauce — an equal quantity of butter, whisked in off the heat, gives you something much closer to béarnaise.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, or steep a few sprigs of tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. Note that the recipe strains out all the aromatics: a true béarnaise finishes with chopped fresh tarragon and chervil stirred in at the end, and this version is noticeably flat without it.
- CornstarchArgo and Kingsford's were both Corn Products Refining brands; any cornstarch is identical. Slurry it with cold water as directed — dropped in dry it will lump instantly in hot stock.
- Cooking the onion and vinegarFive minutes at a bare simmer in a nonreactive pan. Some of the quarter cup of vinegar will cook away in that time, though the recipe says nothing about how far to reduce it; the sharpness is what carries the sauce.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 cups by the volume of the ingredients; the recipe itself states no yield or number of servings. Serve warm, not hot, and hold it over barely warm water -- reheating hard will split it or turn it pasty.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the kitchens of the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name a nod to Henri IV, who was born in Béarn; the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The classic sauce is an emulsion of butter and egg yolk sharpened with a tarragon-and-shallot vinegar reduction, and it is fussy. What appears here is something else: a booklet issued by a corn-milling concern, in which cornstarch stabilises the yolks and corn oil replaces the butter. Promotional cookbooks of this kind were a major vehicle for teaching American home cooks French-sounding dishes in the early twentieth century, and they reliably rewrote those dishes around whatever the sponsor sold. The result is easier, cheaper and stable on a steam table — and a good deal less like béarnaise.