Home › Savouries and Hors d'Oeuvre › Rémoulade Sauce
Rémoulade Sauce
Cut the prawns, celery, pickles and truffles into small dice.
Mix with a little rémoulade sauce, which is a stiff mayonnaise sauce mixed with finely chopped parsley, fennel, tarragon leaves, and shalot, and prepared mustard; add to this just sufficient tomato purée to colour it.
Cut the rolls in half, scoop out the crumbs, fill with the mixture, cover the surface with a thin round piece of aspic jelly.
Garnish with strips of hard-boiled whites of eggs, capers, truffles, and parsley. Serve on small dishes.
Caviar aux Écrevisses. (Caviare and Prawns.) Ingredients.
Two ounces of Russian Caviare.
Half a Shalot (finely chopped).
This is really two things at once: a working formula for rémoulade, and an assembly job for filled rolls to be served cold. The sauce is the part worth learning.
- Read the last two lines as an intrusionThe words from "Caviar aux Écrevisses" onward belong to the next recipe in the book, whose ingredient list has run on into this page. Ignore them when you cook; nothing here calls for caviare.
- Stiff mayonnaise means stiffThe mayonnaise has to hold a peak, because diced prawns, celery and pickle all shed liquid, and a loose sauce will soak the roll. Work in the oil slowly to a thick emulsion and use it sparingly — the phrase "a little rémoulade sauce" is deliberate. Bind, do not drown.
- Shalot, fennel, prepared mustard"Shalot" is shallot. "Fennel" here most likely means the feathery fronds, not the bulb, chopped fine like the parsley and tarragon. "Prepared mustard" is wet table mustard rather than powder; any smooth mixed mustard will serve.
- Tomato purée for colour onlyA teaspoon or so, added at the end. It is there to tint the sauce pink, not to flavour it, and modern concentrated tomato paste is probably stronger than the purée intended here — add a little at a time.
- PrawnsSmall cooked cold-water prawns or shrimp, peeled, and diced no larger than the celery so the filling stays even. Truffle can be left out without wrecking the dish; a few finely diced brown mushrooms cooked dry are a plainer substitute.
- The aspic lidSet a shallow tray of aspic (or clarified stock with gelatine — use noticeably more than the usual 1 sachet per 500 ml if you want a jelly firm enough to cut and lift), chill until fully set, then stamp out rounds with a cutter the width of the roll. Cut them cold and lay them on cold filling, or they will slump.
- The rollsSmall soft dinner rolls, about the size of a plum. Halve them, hollow out the crumb, and fill just before serving — an hour ahead at most, kept cold, or the bread turns damp.
- Yield and serviceThe page gives no quantities, but a cup of filling should dress roughly a dozen roll halves, which is one or two per person as an hors d'oeuvre. Serve cold, on small dishes, as the book directs.
- Uncooked eggHomemade mayonnaise is raw egg yolk that is never heated. Use very fresh eggs, keep the finished dish refrigerated, and serve it the day it is made; pasteurised eggs are sensible if anyone at the table is pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised.
Rémoulade began as a cold mustard-and-herb sauce in classical French cookery — the name is generally traced to a Picard dialect word for horseradish, ramolas, which hints at a sharper, rougher ancestor than the herb mayonnaise Escoffier's generation settled on. By the time this book was written, the standard version was stiff mayonnaise with mustard, capers, anchovy and fines herbes, and the tomato purée here does what a great deal of Edwardian garnishing did: it supplies colour. The filled roll capped with a disc of aspic belongs to the same fashion, the hors d'oeuvre variés that opened a long dinner — small, cold, precisely cut, and designed to be looked at as much as eaten. The page runs straight on into a caviare and prawn dish.