In all our hours testing recipes I remember this as a pivotal moment. Let’s call it the Day We Realized you can cheat on an emulsion sauce. To make an emulsion in the authentic French tradition you have to stand at the stove and hope. It’s not easy. Eggs so easily curdle into one big mess.

But 26 years ago The Service League of Hickory, NC, shared a most profound cooking secret for making a hollandaise sauce in a community cookbook called “Market to Market.” It opened hollandaise access forever so that anyone with a microwave can cheat enough to make it. Or a glorious replica.

And that brings us to béarnaise sauce and steak. Because béarnaise is a daughter of Hollandaise, (the mother of French emulsion sauces), Alicia and I figured you also can cheat on béarnaise in the microwave. Like mother, like daughter. And so the bearnaise pictured above is our own tweak on the original recipe.

But enough babble. Make the béarnaise. Put it on a steak. (Any steak, grilled or not.) And then we predict you’ll fall at the altar of the Service League of Hickory, and thank your lucky stars they wrote a cookbook. (You also could thank your lucky stars that we got the book as a wedding gift.)

Several plaques on our arteries no doubt owe their existence to this trick as well because now we can make this utterly fattening sauce to our heart’s discontent. But that is another issue entirely.