Every night that you’re open, you have to make a twenty-four-egg hollandaise. What that means is that every night you need a heavy stainless-steel bowl, a whisk, melted butter, a couple of lemons, cayenne pepper, and two dozen eggs. It’s nice if the eggs are room temperature, the scum has been skimmed from the top of the butter, and there is a gently bubbling bain-marie for cooking the sauce. Ideal circumstances seldom occur in a restaurant kitchen. You’re working a breakneck speed to get ready for the first rush after dealing with late deliveries, physically or mentally absent employees, and inept management that has once again overbooked the dining room for the evening’s business. Your hollandaise sauce is just one more piece of the puzzle, and of course, it must be perfect.
You begin cracking your cold eggs into your hand, one at a time. Your fingers are spread just wide enough to allow the white of the egg to drip through while your palm gently cradles the fragile yolk, closing a couple of fingers only enough to pinch off the unfortunate embryo. You toss the globular yolk into the stainless-steel bowl. Repeat twenty-four times. Then shoot a couple ounces of tap water into the bowl and take it over to the stove. Turn a burner onto the lowest setting it can manage, hold the bowl down on the puny flame with one towel-insulated hand, and whip the hell out of the yolk-water mixture with the other. Stir and stir and wait for the mixture to thicken and turn pale, pale yellow. Watch carefully for any lumps forming around the edges, indicating that, even with this pathetic little flame, you’re overcooking the sauce and making a bowl of worthless scrambled eggs.
When your yolks form a decent ribbon off the whisk, take them off the fire, throw your towel down on the steel table, and nestle the bowl in the towel. Grab the ladle in the melted butter and simultaneously drizzle a few drops of liquid butter into the eggs while you once again crank with the whisk. If you splash too much butter in now or if the butter is too hot, the mixture will curdle. If you don’t stir fast enough, the molten butter will puddle and will not be incorporated into the nascent hollandaise. So you ever-so-slowly introduce the butter, just a few drops at a time, and make sure that every drop is diligently whisked into the whole. Gradually, the added butter triples the volume of the mixture, and you’re ready to incorporate the juice of two lemons and your own unique seasoning. If you do everything just right and if the humidity in the kitchen isn’t too high and if nobody distracts you during the process and if there’s not a trace of any foreign matter on the whisk, the bowl, or your fingers, A MIRACLE OCCURS. The egg yolks and water absorb the butterfat. This mixture in turn absorbs the citric acid and spices and, perhaps, a little sweat from your forehead. Voilà! You’ve created a hollandaise worthy of your asparagus, your blue-fish, and the arteries of your customers.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. Someone with a modicum of skill combines all sorts of disparate elements. Oil doesn’t mix with water; egg yolks should coagulate when touched by direct heat; and the intrusive acid should send all the other elements flying apart. Yet somehow, under intense pressure, all these unique ingredients are tossed together, tossed together and transformed.