Hollandaise Sauce

In the year 1948 BCE (Before the Child Era), hollandaise was, for American home cooks, the only classic sauce they made from scratch themselves. At least I cannot recall my mother or anyone else preparing mayonnaise or béarnaise or any brown sauce more complex than a gravy thickened with beurre manié. But hollandaise was the exception: it bathed—and still bathes—those poached eggs over broiled ham on toasted English muffins named after E. C. Benedict (1834–1920), the Connec