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Mayonnaise Tartar
Add to one cup of mayonnaise dressing one-fourth cup of chopped olives, gherkins, capers and parsley. Serve with fish.
A two-line sauce that depends entirely on how you read the measurement and how finely you chop. Both are worth settling before you start.
- The ambiguous quarter cup"One-fourth cup of chopped olives, gherkins, capers and parsley" can be read as a quarter cup total or a quarter cup of each. A quarter cup of each into one cup of mayonnaise gives a relish held together by dressing rather than a sauce; a quarter cup total is closer to what most tartare sauces look like. Start with a quarter cup total and add more if you want it stiffer.
- GherkinsThe word normally meant small pickled cucumbers in vinegar brine; sour rather than sweet is the safer reading here. Cornichons or any tart dill pickle give the intended sharpness; sweet pickle turns the sauce cloying against fish.
- CapersSalt-packed capers need rinsing and a soak before chopping, or they will oversalt the whole cup. Brined capers can go in drained and roughly chopped.
- Chop, do not minceThe sauce should have texture. Chop everything to roughly caper size and dry the pieces on a towel — wet pickle and olive will thin the mayonnaise and it will weep on the plate.
- The mayonnaise itselfThe recipe assumes a mayonnaise dressing already made, of the period sort built on uncooked egg yolk. Commercial mayonnaise made with pasteurized egg substitutes directly and keeps longer once the pickles are in.
- Yield and holdingAbout a cup and a quarter on the quarter-cup-total reading, closer to two cups if you add a quarter cup of each; roughly four to six servings of fish. Made with commercial mayonnaise it should hold three or four days refrigerated, and the flavor is better after an hour than immediately.
- SeasoningNo salt, pepper or acid is specified; the olives, capers and pickle supply all three. Taste before adding anything, and if it needs lift use lemon rather than more salt.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee, who cooked for Pullman dining cars and later for the subsidiary companies of U.S. Steel — among the earliest cookbooks by an African American professional chef. The compressed, assume-nothing style of this entry reads as a working cook's shorthand: it presumes a standing mayonnaise on hand and treats tartare as one of its routine derivatives. The sauce name is generally traced to French sauce tartare, itself connected to the old European term for the Tartars and applied loosely to anything sharp or piquant; by the late nineteenth century it was well established in Anglo-American practice as an accompaniment to fried and boiled fish.