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Tartare Sauce
Yolks of two eggs, gill of salad-oil (or melted butter), salt-spoon salt, half a salt-spoon pepper, a table-spoon good cider vinegar, half tea-spoon mustard, a table-spoon of gherkins. Beat together in a small bowl lightly the vinegar and yolks, add to these, drop by drop, the salad-oil or melted butter, taking care to stir the same way all the time; when this is done, season the mixture with pepper, salt and mustard; add also the gherkins finely chopped (or capers may be substituted), and serve in a gravy boat with boiled salmon or cold meats.
This is a hand-beaten mayonnaise with chopped pickles stirred through — the emulsion is the whole job, and the measurements are in units that have fallen out of use.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon holds about a quarter teaspoon, so this calls for roughly 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper. Season again at the end once the oil has dulled it.
- Drop by drop is the hingeThe oil must go in drop by drop until the mixture visibly thickens, after which it can be added in a thin stream. Adding it faster than the yolks can absorb it is the one thing that breaks the sauce; if it splits, start with a fresh yolk and beat the broken mixture into it slowly.
- Melted butter as the alternativeThe butter version sets firm in the refrigerator and turns greasy on the tongue when cold. If you use butter, keep it barely warm and serve the sauce at room temperature.
- Salad-oilNineteenth-century salad-oil usually meant olive oil, though refined cottonseed oil was increasingly sold under the same name by this date. A neutral oil, or olive oil cut half and half with neutral, gives a result closer to what modern palates expect from tartare.
- MustardHalf a teaspoon of dry mustard powder is meant here, not a prepared condiment. It also helps stabilise the emulsion, so add it early with the vinegar if you want insurance.
- Raw yolksThe yolks are never cooked. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated and use it within two or three days.
- Yield and servingMakes about two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six as an accompaniment. Modern versions usually add chopped parsley, shallot or a squeeze of lemon; this one relies on the gherkins alone.
Tartare sauce takes its name from the French sauce tartare; "à la tartare" was a loose culinary label for things served plain, sharp or highly seasoned, and the link to the Tatar peoples is traditional rather than documented. Its presence in a plain Midwestern household manual like Buckeye Cookery (1877) shows how thoroughly the French cold sauces had filtered into ordinary American cooking by the 1870s, usually stripped down: no herbs, no shallot, just yolks, oil, vinegar and whatever pickles were in the crock. The pairing with boiled salmon was common in the period — poached salmon with a cold emulsified sauce was a fixture of summer tables — and the note that the sauce also does for cold meats is a reminder that these books were written for households working through leftovers rather than composing menus.