Home › Shell Fish › Remolade
Remolade
2 hard boiled egg yolks 1 raw egg yolk 1 teaspoon mustard 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon white pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 3 tablespoons tarragon vinegar 1 cup oil Rub together the cooked egg yolks, the raw egg yolk, seasonings and parsley; add two tablespoons of vinegar, combine the oil slowly, adding more vinegar until all has been used. Beat with Dover beater until very light and thick.
This is a hand-built mayonnaise stiffened with cooked yolks — thicker and less likely to break than a straight mayonnaise, and meant to be spooned over cold fish. The whole thing hinges on how slowly the oil goes in.
- Add the oil drop by drop at first"Combine the oil slowly" is doing all the work in this recipe. The first quarter cup should go in a few drops at a time while beating constantly; once the emulsion takes and thickens, you can move to a thin steady stream. Alternating with the remaining vinegar, as directed, keeps the sauce from becoming too stiff to accept more oil.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary egg beater, standard equipment in American kitchens of the period. A balloon whisk works, as does a food processor or immersion blender, though a machine will build the emulsion so fast that you must still trickle the oil in.
- Raw yolkThe single raw yolk is the emulsifier and it is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised. Keep the finished sauce refrigerated and use it within three days.
- The oil"Oil" in an American cookbook of this date usually means olive oil or a bland "salad oil," often cottonseed. A neutral oil gives the cleaner result; extra-virgin olive oil can turn bitter if worked hard in a machine.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out here since it supplies most of the sauce's character. If you only have white wine vinegar, steep a few sprigs of tarragon in it for an hour, or add a teaspoon of chopped fresh tarragon to the sauce.
- MustardDry mustard powder is most likely meant here rather than prepared mustard, as was usual in American recipes of this period. Prepared Dijon will work but adds its own vinegar, so hold back some of the tarragon vinegar if you use it.
- What it is notClassic French rémoulade carries capers, chopped gherkins, anchovy and often more herbs. This is a stripped-down American version; the additions are easy to make if you want the fuller sauce.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough to dress cold poached salmon, crab or shrimp for six to eight.
Rémoulade came into American cookbooks through French cold-kitchen practice, where it belongs to the family of mayonnaise-based sauces served with cold fish and shellfish; the name is generally traced to a Picard dialect word for horseradish, though this is traditional etymology rather than settled fact, and the claim that the earliest versions contained horseradish is not documented. The technique of mashing hard-boiled yolks into a dressing is an old one and gives a more stable, opaque, slightly grainy sauce that holds up on a buffet table. Its appearance in a flour-milling company's promotional cookbook says something about the ambitions of such books: Washburn-Crosby's Gold Medal volumes were not confined to baking but aimed to cover the whole of a well-run household kitchen, and a properly made cold sauce for fish was part of what a competent hostess was expected to produce.