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Hot Sauce Tartare
1/2 cup White Sauce I 1/3 cup Mayonnaise 1/2 shallot, finely chopped 1/2 teaspoon vinegar Capers, Pickles, Olives, Parsley} 1/2 tablespoon each, finely chopped To white sauce add remaining ingredients. Stir constantly until mixture is thoroughly heated, but do not let it come to the boiling-point. Served with boiled, steamed, or fried fish.
A warm tartare, thinned with white sauce rather than served cold from the jar. The whole technique rests on keeping the mayonnaise from breaking.
- Never let it boilMayonnaise is an egg-yolk emulsion; above roughly 160-170F the yolk sets and the sauce curdles into oily flecks. Heat over low heat or a pan of barely simmering water, stirring, only until warm to the finger.
- White Sauce IThe recipe assumes a white sauce given elsewhere in the book. Thin white sauces of the period ran to roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, but check the book's own White Sauce I before measuring the half cup.
- ShallotHalf a shallot, depending on size, gives roughly a teaspoon or two chopped. It is only warmed through, not cooked, so mince it very fine or soften it a minute in butter first if you want it milder.
- The chopped garnishHalf a tablespoon each of capers, pickles, olives and parsley, all finely chopped. Squeeze the capers and pickles dry, or the free brine will thin the sauce and slacken the emulsion.
- VinegarHalf a teaspoon is all that is called for; plain white or cider vinegar suits. The recipe adds it with the other ingredients before warming.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four to six portions of fish. It does not reheat well, so make it as the fish finishes.
Sauce tartare began as a cold mayonnaise sharpened with capers, gherkins and herbs, and by the late nineteenth century it was a common accompaniment to fried fish in Britain, France and the United States. A hot version like this one fits the domestic-science idiom: cookery schools of the era drilled white sauce as a foundational preparation, and combining it with mayonnaise gives a sauce warm enough to serve with hot fish. The instruction not to reach boiling-point is the sort of cause-and-effect direction characteristic of teaching cookbooks.