Bearnaise Sauce
Bearnaise is a hot meat sauce invented by a noted French chef and named by him in honor of Henry the Fourth of France.
To prepare it, put into a saucepan one small finely chopped onion and one tablespoonful of chopped fresh tarragon, one-half of a cupful of white vinegar and one-half of a cupful of white wine, one tablespoonful of peppercorns and a dash of cayenne, in lieu of fresh tarragon use white vinegar and tarragon vinegar in equal parts. Set over the fire in a saucepan and simmer slowly until the liquor is almost evaporated, set aside for two minutes and add two slightly beaten egg yolks. Place the saucepan over boiling water and stir steadily, dropping in a bit at a time, three tablespoonfuls of butter, during this process lift the saucepan several times from the fire, that it may not thicken too rapidly. When very thick, strain into a heated bowl and add, if possible, one teaspoonful of chopped tarragon.
A workable béarnaise, though the butter quantity is far leaner than modern practice and the wording of the tarragon-vinegar substitution is muddled. The reduction is where the sauce is made or lost.
- Reduce hard, then stop"Almost evaporated" is best read as a couple of tablespoons of syrupy liquid at most left in the pan. Take it too far and the reduction scorches and turns bitter; leave it too wet and the emulsion will never thicken.
- The substitution as writtenThe line "in lieu of fresh tarragon use white vinegar and tarragon vinegar in equal parts" is garbled, since it offers vinegar in place of a herb; the likeliest reading is that the half cup of white vinegar becomes a quarter cup each of white and tarragon vinegar. Dried tarragon, about a teaspoon, will also serve in the reduction.
- Butter ratioThree tablespoons of butter to two yolks gives a thin, sharp sauce by current standards. Modern recipes commonly run nearer three to four tablespoons of butter per yolk, so this version is markedly leaner than the sauce usually served today.
- Heat controlThe recipe asks only that the reduction "simmer slowly" over the fire. For the emulsion, the bowl or pan must sit above the boiling water, not in it, and the repeated lifting off the heat the recipe describes is the whole technique for keeping the yolks from scrambling.
- Egg temperatureWhisked properly, the sauce should reach 160F by the time it coats a spoon heavily; hold it there briefly rather than pulling it at the first sign of thickening. Use pasteurized yolks if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- If it breaksA split sauce can usually be brought back by whisking it, drop by drop, into a fresh yolk or a spoonful of warm water in a clean bowl. Overheating past the point of curdling is not recoverable.
- StrainingThe peppercorns go in whole and come out in the strainer, so no grinding is needed. Strain into a warmed bowl and keep the sauce barely warm; held too hot it will break, and refrigeration spoils the texture.
- YieldA scant half cupful, enough for two to four servings alongside grilled venison, steak or game birds. Make it immediately before serving.
Béarnaise is generally traced to the kitchen of Le Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, and to a chef usually named as Collinet, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The name honors Henri IV, born in the province of Béarn, whose statue and legend attached themselves to the restaurant more than to the sauce itself. That this appears in the Game section of a turn-of-the-century American household book says something about how French sauce vocabulary had settled into ordinary English-language cooking by 1900: the compiler assumes a reader who owns a double boiler, can source fresh tarragon or at least tarragon vinegar, and expects a warm emulsified sauce with roast venison or grouse rather than plain pan gravy.