Tartare Sauce
Chop three olives, one gherkin and a tablespoonful of capers. Add them to one-half pint of mayonnaise dressing; thin with a tablespoonful of Tarragon vinegar. This is served with cold meats or fish.
A very short formula, closer to the original French sauce tartare than the sweet jarred version sold today. The proportions are sound; only the units and a few ingredient assumptions need translating.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseThat is one cup (about 240 ml). The finished sauce comes to roughly 1 1/4 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside fish or cold meat.
- GherkinMeans a small sour pickled cucumber (cornichon), not the sweet gherkin common in American jars. Sweet pickle throws the balance off; use a tart one, or a piece of dill pickle.
- OlivesPresumably green olives in brine, stoned. Three is a modest amount for a cup of mayonnaise — taste and add a fourth or fifth if the sauce reads flat. Rinse them if they are heavily salted, since the capers bring salt as well.
- CapersDrain and chop them; brined capers straight from the jar will thin the sauce further and make it sharp. Salt-packed capers should be soaked and rinsed first.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out for this — it is the flavour that distinguishes tartare sauce from plain mayonnaise with pickles. Plain white wine vinegar with a little chopped fresh tarragon is the nearest substitute.
- TextureChop everything fine and reasonably dry. Water carried in on the garnishes is what makes a homemade tartare break or turn soupy after an hour in the refrigerator.
- The mayonnaise itselfThe book assumes you have made it from raw yolks. If you build your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the sauce cold, since nothing here is cooked; commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and needs no such thought.
- RestingHalf an hour in the refrigerator lets the tarragon and caper come forward. Made a day ahead it is still good.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where mayonnaise served as the base and the additions — capers, gherkin, herbs, sometimes mustard or chopped hard-boiled egg — gave each variant its name. The name is generally traced to the Tartars of the Eurasian steppe, invoked in French cookery as shorthand for anything sharp, raw or rough-and-ready, as in steak tartare; the connection is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in an American household book suggests mayonnaise was by then something an ordinary cook might be expected to make at home. The instruction to serve it with cold meats as well as fish is a reminder that the modern pairing with fried seafood was only one of its uses.