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Sauce Tartare
1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Yolks 2 eggs 1/2 cup olive oil 1/4 teaspoon powdered tarragon or 1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar 1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar Capers, Pickles, Olives, Parsley} 1/2 tablespoon each, finely chopped 1/2 shallot, finely chopped Mix mustard, sugar, salt, and cayenne; add yolks of eggs, and stir until thoroughly mixed, setting bowl in pan of ice-water. Add oil, at first drop by drop, stirring with a wooden spoon or wire whisk. As mixture thickens, dilute with vinegar, when oil may be added more rapidly. Keep in cool place until ready to serve, then add remaining ingredients.
This is a hand-built mayonnaise turned into tartare sauce, and it behaves exactly like any emulsion: the oil goes in slowly or not at all.
- The hingeThe first tablespoon of oil must go in literally drop by drop while you stir constantly. Once the yolks have taken it up and visibly thickened, the recipe has you slacken the mixture with the vinegar, after which the oil can go in faster. Rushing the start is the commonest way this fails.
- Cold bowlSetting the bowl in ice-water is not decorative; keeping yolks and oil cool is the traditional insurance against the emulsion breaking. Keep everything, oil included, at cool room temperature or below.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup of oil to two yolks gives a soft, pourable sauce rather than a stiff one. If you want it thicker, take the oil up to three-quarters of a cup, still slowly.
- Raw eggThe yolks are never cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated. Use it within two days.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term usually meant a fine-ground granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Either will serve, given time to dissolve in the seasoning paste or the vinegar.
- Powdered tarragonDried tarragon ground fine. A teaspoon of chopped fresh tarragon is a better substitute than dried, and the tarragon vinegar alternative given in the original is entirely adequate on its own.
- ShallotHalf a shallot is roughly a tablespoon chopped. Chop it very fine or rinse it briefly in cold water if you dislike the raw bite.
- Add-ins lastThe chopped capers, pickles, olives, parsley and shallot go in only at serving time, as directed. They release liquid and will slacken the emulsion if they sit in it.
- YieldClose to a cup once the garnish is added, enough for four to six servings of fried or grilled fish.
Sauce tartare is a cold derivative of mayonnaise, established in nineteenth-century French practice and carried into American cookery books as a standard accompaniment to fried fish. The name is often traced to the French habit of labelling sharp, pungent preparations à la tartare, after the Tartars, rather than to any actual Central Asian dish, though that is traditional explanation rather than documented etymology. What is notable in a book of this vintage is the assumption that a cook would build the mayonnaise by hand with a wooden spoon over ice-water; bottled mayonnaise began reaching American groceries in the 1910s. The chopped garnish of capers, pickles, olives and parsley is still recognisable in modern jarred tartare sauce, though commercial versions often reduce it to chopped pickle alone.