Home › The Principles of Cookery › Remoulade, Indian
Remoulade, Indian
Pound the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, and season the paste with a little salt and a dessert-spoonful of curry-paste or powder. Add very gradually, first by drops and afterwards by tea-spoonfuls, three table-spoonfuls of olive oil, and beat the sauce between every addition. When it is quite smooth add one table-spoonful of vinegar, or more if liked. Remoulade is prepared in this way in the West Indies.
A cooked-yolk emulsion rather than a mayonnaise, so it is far more forgiving than the raw-yolk version — but the oil still has to go in slowly or the paste will stay grainy.
- The hingeWork the yolks to a genuinely smooth paste before any oil goes near them. Cooked yolks emulsify far less readily than raw ones, so most of the smoothness here comes from mechanical breakdown; a lumpy start gives a lumpy sauce no amount of beating will fix. A small bowl and the back of a spoon, or a mortar, beats a whisk here.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, about 10 ml. For curry powder that is a generous but not excessive amount against three yolks.
- Curry-pasteCommercial curry pastes of this period were generally oily, vinegared spice blends, closer to a wet masala than to modern Thai or Indian cook-in pastes. A good madras-style curry powder is a reasonable substitute; if using a modern jarred paste, start with half and taste.
- Toast the powderIf you use dry powder, warm it briefly in a little of the oil before adding it to the yolks. Raw curry powder stirred into a cold sauce tastes dusty and does not bloom.
- ProportionsThree tablespoons of oil to three yolks makes a thick, spoonable paste rather than a pourable sauce. Loosen with more vinegar, a spoonful of water, or a little cream if you want it to coat cold meat or fish.
- VinegarPlain malt or cider vinegar suits it. Add the acid at the end, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and servingAbout half a cup, enough for four as a sauce with cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs, cold fish or shellfish, or as a dressing for a salad of cold cooked vegetables. It keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator and is better brought back to room temperature before serving.
Rémoulade in French cookery of this period meant a sharp, mustard-and-herb sauce built either on mayonnaise or, in the older manner, on pounded hard-boiled yolks — a technique that survives in sauces like gribiche. What Cassell's calls the Indian version replaces the mustard and herbs with curry, and the closing sentence points to the West Indies, where curry powder had found its way into British colonial kitchens. "Indian" in a Victorian English cookbook is rarely a claim of origin; it is shorthand for "curried", and seems to be used in this dictionary for soups, rissoles and sauces that no Indian cook would recognise. The recipe is a small record of how thoroughly curry powder had become a British pantry staple by the late nineteenth century — reached for as a seasoning, like anchovy or cayenne, rather than as a cuisine.