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Vinaigrette Sauce
1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika Few grains pepper 1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar 2 tablespoons cider vinegar 6 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon chopped pickles 1 tablespoon chopped green pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon chopped chives Mix ingredients in order given.
A cold emulsion-free dressing built at a 1:3 vinegar-to-oil ratio, with pickles and herbs for body. The whole thing takes five minutes and keeps a few days refrigerated.
- What matters mostDissolve the salt and pepper in the vinegars before the oil goes in. Salt will not dissolve in oil, and adding it last leaves a gritty sauce.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup once the chopped additions are counted in.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easy to make: a few sprigs of fresh tarragon steeped in white wine vinegar for a week. If you have none, use white wine vinegar and add a pinch of dried tarragon.
- PicklesUnqualified 'pickles' in older Anglo-American cookbooks usually points to small sour cucumber pickles or gherkins rather than sweet ones; sweet pickle will throw the balance.
- PaprikaSweet Hungarian or plain sweet paprika, used here for colour and mildness. Smoked paprika was not a fixture of American cooking before the later twentieth century and will dominate the sauce.
- ServingWhisk again immediately before use, since it separates on standing. Serve cool but not straight from the refrigerator, which mutes the herbs.
Vinaigrette in the older Anglo-American cookbooks means something rather more substantial than the two-ingredient dressings that now carry the name: oil and vinegar sharpened with capers, pickles, onion and green herbs, and served as a sauce rather than shaken over salad leaves. It descends from the French sauce vinaigrette served with cold boiled meats, calf's head and brawn. The green pepper here reads as an American touch; sweet bell peppers were widely available in the United States by the early twentieth century, and turn up in such sauces where a French cook might have used capers or shallot.