Eggs Benedict: Hollandaise sauce made simple

Eggs benedict is, I think, the perfect brunch dish. It combines the best bits of breakfast – eggs, some kind of pig product, a good sauce and bread – with sufficient elegance and composure that it doesn’t feel weird to be eating it after 10am. Although it is the balance of the individual components that make it such a successful dish, that hasn’t stopped restaurants and chefs the world over creating a host of variations. Swap the ham for smoked salmon to turn it into Eggs Royale, or spinach for Eggs Florentine. These are probably the best known variations on the benedict classic, but that’s only the beginning: Eggs Chesapeake adds a Maryland blue crab cake, Eggs Mornay replace the buttery hollandaise with a cheesy mornay sauce, and Eggs Cochon is a New Orleans version which adds pulled pork and replaces the muffin with an American biscuit (turning it, some would say, into an entirely different dish).