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Vinaigrette Sauce
Set 1 teaspoon salt. ⅛ teaspoon black pepper.
Few grains cayenne. 1 tablespoon Tarragon vinegar. 2 tablespoons Malt vinegar. 1½ cup Olive oil. 1 tablespoon chopped olives. 1 tablespoon chopped pickle. 1 tablespoon chopped green or red pepper. 1 teaspoon chopped parsley. 1/2 teaspoons chopped chives.
PROCESS: Put salt, pepper and cayenne in bowl, add oil slowly stirring constantly, add remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. Chill and pour over Boiled Halibut.
A cold chopped sauce in the ravigote family, built on a 1900s American ratio that is heavier on oil than a modern dressing. It comes together in five minutes and needs nothing but a bowl and a spoon.
- "Set" at the head of the listMost likely a heading for setting out the ingredients rather than an instruction; the actual method begins at PROCESS.
- Dissolve the salt firstAs written the salt goes into the bowl and the oil follows, which leaves grains undissolved and gritty. Salt dissolves in vinegar, not oil, so whisk the salt, pepper and cayenne into the two vinegars and then add the oil in a thin stream.
- The vinegarsMalt vinegar is still sold and gives the sauce its brown, faintly sweet backbone; cider vinegar is the nearest substitute. Tarragon vinegar is easy to make by steeping a few bruised sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week, or use white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon.
- ProportionsHalf a cup of oil to three tablespoons of vinegar is roughly 2.7:1, sharper than a classic French vinaigrette. With the salt at a full teaspoon and briny olives and pickle on top, taste before serving and slacken with more oil if it bites.
- "Chopped pickle"In an American book of this date this probably means a sour cucumber pickle rather than a sweet one, though sweet pickles were also common. Cornichons are the closest thing on a modern shelf; drain and chop them fine.
- It will separateThere is no mustard or egg here, so the sauce breaks as it chills. Stir it hard again just before it goes to the table.
- Yield and servingClose to a cup once the chopped ingredients are counted, enough to dress four to six portions of fish. It suits any cold or warm poached white fish, not only halibut, and is good over cold boiled potatoes or asparagus.
Vinaigrette in the older English and American sense meant not a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing but a sauce thickened with chopped things -- pickles, olives, capers, herbs, sometimes hard-boiled egg -- and it sits close to the French sauce ravigote and to what American cookbooks of the same generation printed as "sauce tartare" without mayonnaise. Its usual job was exactly the one given here: to season boiled fish. The presence of both tarragon and malt vinegar is worth noticing. Flavoured vinegars were a standard grocery line around 1900, and malt vinegar in an American book suggests the English influence on this kind of table sauce.