Milk (48 page)

Quickly remove the double-boiler top and taste the sauce for seasoning. Add a little more salt or lemon juice to taste. If desired, add enough cayenne to give it a mild kick. Use it promptly, while still warm. Hollandaise is by nature a last-minute preparation, one of those things that people wait for instead of having it wait for them. If held for more than a few minutes it may break, but if it isn’t too far gone you may be able to salvage it by whisking in a little boiling water, or whisking a fresh egg yolk in a bowl and beating the sauce into it.

VARIATION:
The hollandaise is just finished, the kitchen is steaming like a cauldron, and the dinner timetable has been thrown into chaos by some unforeseen glitch. How to avoid ruin? On such an occasion I discovered an out that actually proved to be a useful cold sauce in its own right: Scrape the warm hollandaise into a small pitcher or glass measuring cup. Pour in enough cold heavy cream to cover the top by barely half an inch. Set it in the refrigerator, where the hollandaise will quickly thicken. When it is nearly solid, work the cream into the sauce with a fork or whisk, adding a little more cream if necessary to bring it to a spreadable consistency. Stir in an extra dash or two of lemon juice and salt. Serve cool or at room temperature. Unlike freshly made hot hollandaise, this daughter-of-necessity version is blessedly stable. It goes beautifully with any of the usual hollandaise partners in their cold (or room-temperature) poached form.

T
he plainest of all egg-and-butter custards is also the most demanding to make, because there is nothing to hinder it from curdling except low heat and endless patience. Scrambled eggs cooked in this manner are to ordinary scrambled eggs as quenelles are to fish burgers, and are the one reason I see for anybody to own a nonstick pan. The only elements are eggs and butter very slowly stirred over the lowest possible heat until the whites coagulate in small, delicate bits and—this is the tricky part—the yolks and butter set to a thin custard, about the consistency of a faintly runny lemon curd without the lemon. If you are willing to dedicate three-quarters of an hour to standing over a nonstick skillet and don’t mind eating the result with a spoon, it is the holy grail of scrambled eggs. Needless to say, the freshest eggs and butter will taste the best.

For each serving

The frugal-minded can cut back slightly on the butter and use two eggs. Since I make this only about twice a year, I usually splurge on three. Gently melt half of the butter in a heavy nonstick skillet, tilting the pan to coat the sides. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool to room temperature. Break the eggs directly into the pan and turn the heat to the lowest possible setting—and I mean lowest; if necessary, use a heat diffuser such as a Flame Tamer. With a wooden spatula or spoon, break up the yolks and begin stirring as slowly and evenly as possible. Keep stirring … and stirring and stirring. It’s like watching paint dry, but there are no shortcuts. The eggs and butter will at first look like a blotchy and very peculiar soup. The egg whites will appear at least partly cooked after 10 or 15 minutes, but the yolks have a long way to go. Keep breaking up any clumps that threaten to form on the bottom of the pan. After 25 to 30 minutes of cooking, stir in the remaining butter along with the optional cream. By degrees the mixture will get smoother and slightly thicker, first starting to coat the back of a spoon, then throwing off a wisp of evaporation and leaving a clean track as you draw the spatula across the bottom of the pan. Keep going until it has cooked for 45 to 50 minutes in all and is a little thinner than a crème anglaise, then pour it over any preferred kind of toast and eat at once. Let everyone season his or her own with salt and pepper.

VARIATION:
The scrambled-egg recipe in
M. F. K. Fisher’s
How to Cook a Wolf
is a very similar but less labor-intensive dish of custardy eggs made with cream instead of butter. The ingredients are eight eggs and a cup of cream. The cream makes the mixture a little more tolerant of heat than the butter-custard version.

A
few years ago
Regina Schrambling wrote a piece for the
Los Angeles Times
food section announcing that she couldn’t understand why people swoon over killer chocolate desserts when such a thing as lemon curd exists on this earth. A woman after my own heart! Like Regina, I was born without the chocolate gene—but put me in front of anything made with lemon curd and I go wild. For me, it’s the most magical application of the custard principle that enables egg yolks to thicken a liquid (here, lemon juice) in the presence of heat.

Lemon “curd,” which technically isn’t a curd, contains neither milk nor cream. The eggs are coaxed to maximum thickening power, without turning into a grainy mass, through an acid-sugar combination that allows the egg protein to coagulate smoothly without breaking, and to emulsify with melted butter at a higher temperature than is possible with most egg-based emulsions. The flavors of the result are simultaneously buttery, sweet, sharp, and silky, all fused into one angelic whole. And it is amazingly easy to make, far easier than any milk- or cream-based egg custard. The one technical necessity is a double boiler or some equivalent arrangement.

Lemon curd is the best of all fillings for a
Lemon Tart
and marvelous in layer cakes. It also makes a glorious mousse when whisked together with whipped cream (in any proportion you want), an excellent topping for bar cookies, a magnificent breakfast jam for toast or scones, or—all by itself—a piece of shameless indulgence for anyone equipped with a spoon. It would also be a natural for the old Southern “pinch pie” or “angel pie,” which consists of a baked meringue shell (voilà—a fine destination for the leftover egg whites) with a rich filling such as ice cream or lemon custard. On occasion I have successfully improvised a sort of trifle using lemon curd and day-old angel food cake (another use for the egg whites).

I always make a large (3-cup) batch using only egg yolks; other people may want to halve the recipe or use whole eggs. Note that the number of lemons needed for a given amount of juice varies phenomenally between different seasons of the year. You will need more in summer, fewer at the height of the winter citrus season. Some people prefer to use much more lemon zest, not peeled in strips but finely grated and added directly to the curd after it has been cooked and strained.

YIELD:
About 3 cups

Melt the
butter in a double boiler over simmering water; whisk in the other ingredients and cook, stirring or whisking constantly, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the mixture thickens enough to coat a spoon. Pour the curd through a fine-mesh strainer into a heatproof bowl, and let it cool with a sheet of plastic wrap pressed over the surface (to prevent a skin from forming). It will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for three to four days.

VARIATION(S):
For
Lime Curd, use limes instead of lemons. Any citrus juice will work, though with orange juice you should slightly reduce the amount of sugar. In fact, you can make this from just about any tart, fresh fruit juice.

I
’m reluctant to give advice about things that I never make myself, and this is why bakers will find no recipes here for butter cakes or butter cookies. On the other hand, I do occasionally make pastry—not the tour-de-force kinds like puff pastry or strudel dough, but simple versions for pies and tarts. And no lover of these could live without butter.

From a flavor standpoint, butter is the ideal fat for pastry. But the technical standpoint is another matter. The very complexities that make butter a wonderful partner for flour in sauces have difficult effects on its interactions with flour in pastry doughs.

When you work butter into a dough at ordinary room temperatures, it will perform its usual subtle
transitions between the solid and melted states—unfortunately meaning that some of the fat will prematurely melt into the flour particles while
the rest is still solid enough to simply coat them from outside. It’s the external coating action that’s important for tender, flaky pastries such as the kind used for American pies. The thin shielding of fat retards the development of gluten during the initial mixing of the dough. There is the added problem of water content in butter. It comes mostly from the dispersed
buttermilk droplets, but sometimes also from rinsing water that wasn’t completely expelled in the final working of commercial butter. The leakage of fat and water into the flour is what often makes all-butter pastry brittle, tough, or both.

Lard and partially hydrogenated shortenings don’t share these disadvantages. In the first place, they liquefy more uniformly and at higher temperatures than butter, so that melting can be delayed until the pastry actually goes into the oven. They also contain virtually a hundred percent fat, and so have no water to release into the dough and throw off a cook’s calculations about how much water to add in mixing. Shortenings like Crisco have long been the mainstay of cooks devoted to the goal of tender, flaky American-style pie crust. (I don’t know whether recent reformulations to eliminate
trans fatty acids have changed these products’ baking qualities.) A few, like me, rely on a combination of butter and lard to offset the problems inherent in using butter alone.

But there’s another family of pastry doughs in which butter is not only the best but the only fat you can use: the very fine-textured, almost shortbreadlike ones such as French
pâte brisée and German
Mürbeteig.
Higher in fat content than
American pie doughs, they start with butter being worked into dry ingredients in rather coarse bits at as cold a temperature as possible. A small amount of water with or without some other liquid (egg yolk is the most usual for pâte brisée) is then added, and the dough loosely gathered together in a mass. It is now ready for the crucial stage of
fraisage
—in this context, something like “rumpling.” Fraisage is accomplished by rapidly and firmly smearing the dough across the work surface with the heel of your hand in order to amalgamate the fat and flour very closely. The dough is then chilled for at least an hour (preferably longer) before the final rolling out. Pastry made by this method is simultaneously firm and crumbly, with just enough gluten development to hold together. And it practically sings of the butter that went into it.

Some version of pâte brisée is the backbone of classic
French tart shells. For savory tarts like quiche, the pastry is usually unsweetened or made with only a tiny bit of sugar. For dessert tarts it can be sweetened or not. The reason for adding sugar is not only flavor but ease of working; it tends to inhibit the development of gluten and lets the cook handle the dough more swiftly and decisively without causing the pastry to toughen. Moderately sweetened
pâte brisée is usually called
pâte sucrée.
An especially crumbly version,
pâte sablée,
uses more sugar for a more cookie-like effect.