I put the yolks and water on a ridiculously low heat, and anxiously stir them together, lifting the pan off the stove periodically to soothe a growing paranoia that strands of scrambled egg lurk beneath the surface.
McGee cautions that "the small volume of the initial egg mixture is easily overcooked", which sounds suspiciously like a challenge to me. However, Carême, the "king of chefs, and chef of kings" (thanks Wikipedia), piques my interest with a particularly tricksy method, in which the egg yolks and water are heated gently until thickened, and "pats of whole butter" are then whisked in to emulsify the butterfat and thin the cooked eggs. Harold McGee gives a number of techniques for making hollandaise, some of which, including the "butter mayonnaise" which doesn't even begin to cook the yolks and the sabayon-style, which makes a foam, rather than the unctuous sauce I'm seeking, don't strictly qualify as such. It takes bloody ages to thicken, and then I go and spoil it by squeezing in too much lemon juice to loosen it, but it tastes as good as yolks and butter ought to. I set a heatproof glass bowl over a pan of simmering water, and then add three egg yolks and a little water, then gradually pour in 200g of "almost-melted" butter (by which I assume he means stuff which has a few lumps swimming it it), whisking furiously. This, of course, has the benefit of keeping your delicate eggs away from direct heat, but, as a flip side, creates more washing up. The most common approach to keeping your sauce cool is to use a bain marie, as Nigel Slater advises. Caution, therefore, is good: fear, however, will almost certainly curdle your hollandaise quicker than the evillest of eyes. The trick, according to food science god Harold McGee, is "heat the egg yolks enough to obtain the desired thickness, but not so much that the yolk proteins coagulate into little solid curds and the sauce separates". Ignore the hype, forget the breathy MasterChef-style commentary in your head, and just remember that hollandaise, like its steak-friendly cousin béarnaise, is nothing but a hot egg and butter sauce. The main difficulty, I think, is not that hollandaise is particularly difficult to make, once you understand the science of it it's the cult of the Sauce, by which I don't mean tomato ketchup and its ilk, but the backbone of the classic French repertoire, the kind of recipe which sounds like one should have a legion d'honneur to even dare attempting. British asparagus deserves better than curdled eggs. Hollandaise is, I think, the single greatest thing a spear of asparagus can aspire to, yet the path to perfection is fraught with danger for the cook. And there, of course, is the lone fly in this mouthwatering ointment. Unlike, say, hot cross buns, asparagus is so beautifully easy to prepare that I can happily gorge on it morning noon and night during its brief season – initially just drenched in butter, and then, once the first frenzy has worn off and I can bear to wait more than five minutes for my fix, in more adventurous ways: baked with ham, steamed and served with anchovies and lemon zest, topped with a poached egg, or, of course, dipped into a big, greedy bowl of rich yellow hollandaise. Forget weddings or, even, dare I say it, the workers of the world: the first green shoots of spring are what gets my heart leaping at this time of year.
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