Everyone gets hepped up, on the subject of béarnaise sauce, about the exquisitely difficult application of graduated heat that’s necessary to make a good one. Crank the flame too high: the egg yolks curdle. Too low: sauce doesn’t thicken. True. However, equally as difficult, and where most home cooks make their mistake, is the way they add the butter. Put it in too quickly and the sauce won’t emulsify. It’ll separate faster than Madonna and (insert her paramour de jour here). Learning just how fast you can push the butter into the sauce is a skill a good restaurant chef develops over time.
Less talented hands in some restaurants rely on a couple of tricks. One is to skip the slow mixing of the yolks and go with a pre-made emulsion—like mayonnaise. When your béarnaise sauce has a slightly sulfurous aftertaste, it’s often because the emulsion came from Hellman’s instead of in the kitchen. Another fast one is to use powdered veal stock instead of making one’s own. The béarnaise sauce made with powdered stock usually has a slightly gritty texture.
And a manche de gigot? It’s a long pair of pliers-like pincers that can be cranked together with a small wheel, to fit around the cooked leg of a lamb or other animal, providing a holder to make the meat easier to carve. The manche is the projecting bone in such a piece of meat. (A manchette is that frilly paper cone no one puts on the legs of roast turkey anymore except in cartoons.)
You can still buy manche de gigot, really fancy silver and rosewood models, found mostly on specialty cooking sites on the web. Get one for the next present you have to take to a wedding and you can damn well bet it’ll stand out from those six toasters the couple got.
