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Dutch Sauce
This is the same as above, made richer. Stir and blend over the fire 1/2 pint of melted butter and the yolks of four eggs, set in another pan, like a custard. Do not boil, merely keep hot, or it will curdle. Add salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon juice and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley and a tiny pinch of nutmeg.
An early hollandaise, built on the older English "melted butter" sauce rather than on butter alone. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: the yolks must thicken without ever approaching a simmer.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddleIn British and American cookbooks of this era, "melted butter" usually means the flour-thickened butter sauce (commonly about a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, thinned with water or fish stock, then finished with more butter) rather than plain liquid butter. Whether that is what the "above" refers to cannot be settled from this page alone. Starting with plain liquid butter will give you something much closer to a modern hollandaise, and much more likely to split.
- Half a pintOne cup in American measure, 10 fl oz if the book is working in imperial. Either way it is a generous quantity of base for four yolks, which is why the sauce is thickened rather than emulsified in the modern sense.
- "Set in another pan"This is a bain-marie. Use a heatproof bowl or the top of a double boiler over barely steaming water, not water at a rolling boil, and keep the base of the bowl clear of the water.
- The temperature that mattersYolks begin to thicken around 150F and scramble past about 185F. Hold the sauce at 160-170F and stir constantly. "Do not boil, merely keep hot" is the entire technique in six words.
- If it curdlesPull it off the heat immediately, drop in an ice cube or a spoonful of cold water and whisk hard. If it has gone properly grainy, whisk a fresh yolk in a clean bowl over the water bath and beat the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Acid goes in at the endThe two tablespoons of lemon juice are added after the sauce has thickened, as written. Adding acid to the yolks at the start makes them set at a lower temperature and increases the odds of graininess.
- Holding and servingMakes roughly a cup and a half, enough for six portions of poached fish or asparagus. It will not keep; hold it no more than half an hour in a warm (not hot) water bath and never reheat it directly.
- Egg safetyThe yolks in a well-made version of this sauce are cooked, but only just. Anyone cooking for the very young, the elderly, or the immune-compromised should use pasteurised eggs.
"Dutch sauce" is simply the English name for what French kitchens call sauce hollandaise, and the two terms sat side by side in nineteenth-century cookbooks with no clear division of labour. The Dutch attribution is traditional rather than documented; the usual explanation offered is that the sauce, or its butter, was associated with the Low Countries, though egg-and-butter sauces of this type were being made across northern Europe long before anyone standardised a name. What is distinctive about this version is its English scaffolding: it appears not to be the pure butter emulsion of the classic French repertoire, and the reference to melted butter suggests a flour-bound base enriched with yolks, a thriftier and considerably more forgiving construction. The nutmeg is another mark of an older tradition, when it was used freely in savoury sauces.