Home › The Principles of Cookery › REMOULADE (another way)
REMOULADE (another way)
Take the yolks of two eggs boiled hard, about a tea-spoonful of flour of mustard rubbed up with three or four table-spoonfuls of oil; mix these ingredients well, and when they are thoroughly incorporated add two table-spoonfuls of vinegar, and a little pepper, and other flavouring materials according to taste. Remoulade is much employed in making the salad known as mayonnaise.
This is a cooked-yolk rémoulade, closer to a French sauce ravigote or a nineteenth-century salad dressing than to the pickle-and-caper rémoulade sold today. The whole thing hinges on working the oil into the sieved yolks slowly enough that they absorb it.
- Flour of mustardThis is dry mustard powder, not a flour-and-mustard mixture. English mustard powder is the direct descendant; a teaspoon is assertive, so start with half if you want a milder sauce.
- Sieve the yolksHard-boiled yolks mashed with a fork stay grainy. Push them through a fine sieve or crush them to a smooth paste with the back of a spoon before any oil goes in, or the sauce will never come together.
- Add the oil in stagesThe recipe says to mix until thoroughly incorporated, and that is the instruction that matters. Work in the oil a spoonful at a time, beating between additions; dumping in three tablespoons at once leaves the yolks swimming in oil.
- Which oilA period cook meant olive oil, and a mild one suits the sauce better than a peppery modern extra-virgin, which will fight the mustard. Any neutral oil also works.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons to three or four of oil is a sharp ratio by current taste. Add one, taste, then decide; white wine or cider vinegar is closer to the intended effect than harsh distilled vinegar.
- Other flavouring materialsLeft deliberately open. Chopped capers, gherkins, anchovy, tarragon, chervil, chives and a spoonful of finely chopped shallot are all within the tradition.
- Yield and keepingTwo yolks with this much oil and vinegar make roughly half a cup, enough to dress a salad for four or to serve alongside cold meat or fried fish. Refrigerate and use within two days.
- The last sentenceRead it as period usage rather than instruction. Cassell's is using "mayonnaise" to mean a dressed composed salad, not the emulsion; this sauce is the dressing for it, not an ingredient in bottled mayonnaise.
Rémoulade is one of the old French cold sauces, and the name is generally traced to a dialect word for horseradish or black radish, which points to the sharp root-and-mustard character the sauce has always had rather than to the herb-and-pickle mayonnaise version familiar now. Nineteenth-century English cookery books carried two families of rémoulade side by side: one built on raw yolks like a mayonnaise, and a more forgiving kind built on hard-boiled yolks, which will not split and needs no cold hand or steady arm. That reliability is why a household dictionary such as Cassell's gives it as "REMOULADE (another way)," set beside the other rémoulade recipe, and why it turns up so often as the dressing for cold salads, boiled fish and remains of a joint. The loose closing instruction to flavour "according to taste" is characteristic of the period, when a sauce was a method to be varied rather than a fixed formula.