Sauce Tartare
To one cup of Mayonnaise Dressing add one finely chopped shallot, one tablespoon each finely chopped capers, sweet gherkins, olives, and one-half tablespoon each finely chopped parsley and fresh tarragon. Mix well and keep cool until ready to serve. 人
A straightforward cold sauce that depends almost entirely on how finely and how dryly the solids are chopped. Made with a cup of mayonnaise it yields roughly 1¼ cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside fried fish or cold meat.
- Squeeze the solids dryCapers, gherkins and olives all carry brine, and a wet mince can thin the mayonnaise into a loose, watery sauce. Chop them, then press them in a towel or fine sieve before folding in.
- Chop fine, not to pasteThe recipe asks only that the solids be finely chopped; aim for a sauce speckled throughout rather than chunky. A food processor pulverises the gherkins into juice; use a knife.
- ShallotShallots vary widely in size, and a large modern bulb can weigh 2 ounces. Use about a tablespoon of minced shallot and no more, or its raw bite will overwhelm the tarragon.
- Fresh tarragonHalf a tablespoon chopped is about 1½ teaspoons, or roughly half a teaspoon of dried if fresh is unavailable. Dried tarragon needs the sauce to sit 30 minutes or so to soften and release.
- The mayonnaise baseIf the book's Mayonnaise Dressing is an uncooked egg-yolk emulsion, as most mayonnaises are, it means raw egg. If you make it from scratch rather than using a jar, use pasteurised eggs, particularly when serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- Rest before serving"Keep cool until ready to serve" is doing real work here: an hour in the refrigerator lets the shallot and herbs perfume the whole sauce. Best used within a day or two, as the chopped pickles gradually release liquid.
- What it was forA sauce of this kind went with fried or broiled fish, cold boiled salmon, or crab and lobster. It is also served with breaded fried veal and with cold tongue.
Sauce tartare is a nineteenth-century French restaurant sauce — mayonnaise carrying the same chopped pickled garnish that the classic kitchen used for rémoulade — and the name is often said to come from the fashionable culinary shorthand "à la tartare," a vague gesture at the fierce and the piquant rather than to any Central Asian cooking, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. By the time this book appeared, the sauce had passed thoroughly into American domestic use: mayonnaise was one of the few French emulsions the ordinary household cook was expected to master, and dressing it up with capers, gherkins and a shallot turned one basic preparation into a second, more impressive one without a stove. Cold sauces belong to warm-weather menus, and fish, crab and lobster were the season's obvious Sunday centrepiece.