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Remoulade-French Salad Dressing
This sauce is very much like an ordinary English salad-dressing, and is used in the same way. It is also an excellent accompaniment to chops or cold meats of various kinds. To make it, boil three eggs till hard. Throw them into cold water, strip off the shells and the whites of the eggs, and pound the yolks in a mortar, with a dessert-spoonful of mustard and a little salt and cayenne. When these ingredients are thoroughly blended, and the paste is quite smooth, add, first by drops and afterwards by tea-spoonfuls, three table-spoonfuls of olive oil, and beat the sauce well between every addition. When it is quite thick, add the yolk of a raw egg, and afterwards, very gradually, one table-spoonful of plain or tarragon vinegar. The flavour of this sauce may be varied at pleasure by the addition of a tea-spoonful of Harvey's sauce, two or three pounded shallots, a very small piece of garlic; or chilli, cucumber, or shallot vinegar may be substituted for tarragon vinegar. The proportion of oil and vinegar used may be varied according to taste. Time, a quarter of an hour to boil the eggs.
An egg-yolk emulsion built in a mortar rather than a bowl, closer to a stiff sauce tartare than to the celery-root rémoulade sold in French delicatessens today. The whole thing hinges on the oil going in slowly enough.
- Add the oil drop by dropCooked yolks hold oil far less readily than raw ones, and dumping the oil in will give a greasy, split paste. Work in the first spoonful literally drop by drop, beating hard between each addition, and only move to teaspoonfuls once the paste has visibly thickened.
- Fifteen minutes is too long for the eggsA quarter of an hour at a boil gives chalky yolks with a grey-green sulphur ring. Ten to twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, gives yolks that pound smoother and taste cleaner. The cold-water plunge in the original is there to stop the cooking and loosen the shells, and it is still the right move.
- Dessert-spoonfulAn intermediate Victorian measure between teaspoon and tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons. Use English or Dijon mustard; a mild yellow American mustard will leave the sauce flat.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy bottled condiment, popular through the nineteenth century and long discontinued. Worcestershire sauce is its nearest surviving relative and can be used in the same quantity.
- Pounded shallots and garlic"Pounded" means reduced to a paste in the mortar, not chopped. A microplane or a pinch of salt under the flat of a knife does the same job; chopped shallot will make the sauce gritty rather than perfumed.
- The raw yolkThe final raw yolk loosens the paste and stabilises the emulsion. Since the sauce is never cooked, use a very fresh egg, keep the finished sauce refrigerated and eat it within a day or two; pasteurised eggs are worth seeking out if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- Flavoured vinegarsTarragon, chilli, cucumber and shallot vinegars were familiar in Victorian kitchens and are now specialist buys. Steeping a handful of the herb or a split chilli in white wine vinegar for a week reproduces them closely enough.
- Yield and useThree yolks and three tablespoons of oil make roughly half a cup, enough to dress a salad for four or to serve with cold meat for the same number. It sets firm on standing; slacken with a few drops of vinegar or cold water before serving.
Cassell's presents rémoulade as a variant of English salad dressing. French cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used the name for a sharp, mustard-and-herb sauce served with cold meat and fish. The origin of the word is uncertain and usually traced to a northern French dialect term for horseradish, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. The hard-yolk method here belongs to an older lineage than mayonnaise proper: cooked yolks pounded with mustard and oil were a common form of English salad dressing before whisked raw-yolk emulsions became widespread, and the recipe's final raw yolk shows the two techniques overlapping. Its later fame in Louisiana, where rémoulade turned red with paprika and Creole mustard and went over shrimp, is a separate branch of the same family.