Hollandaise Sauce Made Easy - from a 17th-Century Kitchen

“I can’t make hollandaise sauce—it’s too hard.”

How many times have you heard that or said it yourself? No single recipe epitomizes everything people love and fear about French cuisine more fully than hollandaise sauce, a luscious emulsion of egg yolks and butter flavored with a little lemon juice. A properly made hollandaise sauce is sophisticated, perfectly balancing acidity and richness. Its satiny texture transforms simple foods such as steamed vegetables and poached fish into voluptuous indulgences.

Hollandaise is heavenly to eat, but tricky to make: heat it a little too much and you end up with a curdled mess; add the butter too quickly and the sauce separates into pools of butterfat and sour liquid. Hollandaise should not be kept warm for extended periods (especially these days when salmonella is so common in eggs) and thus is best prepared right before it is served. Many cooks, including those of us who are otherwise confident about using classical French techniques, have found ourselves frantically trying to reconstitute a broken sauce or making a second batch from scratch while guests kill time drinking too much wine. Other cooks simply rule out hollandaise as a recipe too fussy or too intimidating to try in the first place.

Not to worry. Hollandaise itself descends directly from one of the oldest and most celebrated recipes in the history of French cuisine and, in its original form, it is not nearly as intimidating as cooks now find it. We’ll get to that, but first a bit of history.

After the jump: La Varenne, Sauce Blanche, the potager, and fool-proof hollandaise

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