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Sauce Tartare
a Stir into a cup of mayonnaise, two small sweet-pickled cucumbers, three olives and handful of watercress chopped fine; a few capers and a little onion juice. If you live in that happy valley where you can get a fresh shad for this course, by all means use it Broil it, garnish with quarters of lemon and with the roe, parboiled and broiled brown; rub with butter frequently while over the fire. - Anne Warner.
A short, loosely written sauce with a fish suggestion attached. The proportions are all by eye, so taste as you go and chop everything fine enough that no single piece dominates a spoonful.
- Chop, then drainThe hinge of any tartare sauce is moisture. Pickles, olives and watercress all carry water that will thin a cup of mayonnaise into a slurry; press the chopped pickle and olives in a towel before folding them in.
- Sweet-pickled cucumbersThese are what a modern market sells as sweet gherkins or bread-and-butter pickles. Two small ones is roughly two tablespoons chopped. Dill pickle gives a sharper, less period-correct sauce.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate half a small onion and squeeze, or press it in a garlic press. A quarter teaspoon is enough for a cup of mayonnaise.
- OlivesProbably green olives, pitted, though the recipe does not specify. Stuffed pimiento olives are a fair stand-in.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six portions of fish.
- The mayonnaiseIf you make it from scratch it will contain raw yolk. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the sauce refrigerated; it holds two or three days at most with the vegetables in it.
- Shad, if you can get itAmerican shad is seasonal, regional and heavily bone-laden, and several Atlantic fisheries are now closed or restricted. Check what is legal and available where you are; bluefish, mackerel or trout take the same treatment and the same sauce.
- Broiling the fish and roeUnder a modern broiler, time depends on the cut and thickness; broil skin side down without turning until the flesh is opaque and flakes, to 145F, basting with butter as the recipe directs. The roe sac should be simmered gently a few minutes until firm, patted dry, then browned briefly; pierce it once before it goes near the heat so it does not burst.
Sauce tartare is French in name and nineteenth-century in habit: a mayonnaise base stiffened with chopped pickles, capers and herbs, served cold against hot fried or broiled fish. Its name is generally traced to the vague European use of "à la tartare" for anything sharp or rough-textured rather than to any Tatar cooking. The shad note is the more revealing part of the entry. Shad ran up the Atlantic rivers in vast spring shoals through the 1800s, and shad and roe were a fixture of Eastern seaboard spring menus — cheap in the Delaware and Hudson valleys, unobtainable inland, which is exactly why Anne Warner speaks of a "happy valley where you can get a fresh shad." Dam building, pollution and overfishing cut those runs sharply in the century that followed, so a line that read as a modest regional aside in a general-purpose cook book now marks a fish most American cooks have never handled.