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Mock Hollandaise Sauce
1½ cups milk 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika Juice 1/2 lemon 1/3 cup thick mayonnaise Measure the Mazola in a saucepan, add the cornstarch and seasonings and gradually stir in the milk. When boiling rapidly, add the lemon juice and beat in the mayonnaise.
A cornstarch-thickened stand-in for hollandaise, built on corn oil rather than butter and egg yolk. It behaves like a thin white sauce until the mayonnaise goes in, and that is where it succeeds or fails.
- Take it off the heat for the mayonnaiseThe instruction to beat in the mayonnaise reads as though it happens over the flame, but mayonnaise is an egg-yolk emulsion and will break and look curdled if the sauce is still boiling. Pull the pan off, let it stop bubbling for half a minute, then whisk the mayonnaise in.
- Mazola is corn oilAny neutral oil works; the brand names suggest this is a promotional booklet from the maker. Note that oil and cornstarch will not form a stable roux the way butter and flour do, so whisk hard to disperse the starch before the milk goes in, or add a splash of the cold milk first to make a slurry.
- Argo and Kingsford's are plain cornstarchTwo more house brands. Measure the two tablespoons level; heaped spoons give a sauce closer to pudding.
- "Boiling rapidly" is deliberateCornstarch needs to come to a full boil to thicken properly and lose its raw, chalky taste. Bring it to the boil and give it a brief minute, stirring constantly, before adding anything else; much longer and the gel starts to thin again.
- Acid last, for a reasonLemon juice added early will weaken the starch gel and leave you with a runny sauce. Adding it after the boil, as written, is correct. Half a lemon is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons.
- Paprika is doing colour workA quarter teaspoon of sweet paprika tints the pale sauce, though toward orange-pink rather than the true yellow-gold of a yolk-based hollandaise. Use sweet, not hot or smoked.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings over poached eggs, asparagus, broccoli or poached fish. It thickens further as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of hot milk rather than reheating over direct heat.
This is corporate cookery: Mazola, Argo and Kingsford's were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and booklets like this one existed to demonstrate that a household could cook a full week of meals out of a corn-oil bottle and a starch box. The recipe's logic is of its period in another way too. True hollandaise demands butter and yolks held in a nervous emulsion over hot water, and "mock" versions are generally said to have proliferated in American home cookbooks wherever butter was dear, cooks were untrained, or a sauce needed to survive on a steam table. Building the body from a starch-thickened milk base and borrowing the tang and richness from ready-made mayonnaise gave a nearly foolproof result, which is precisely what a book aimed at the home cook wanted.