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Sauce Tartare
½ pint of mayonnaise dressing 3 olives I gherkin 1 tablespoonful of capers Chop the olives, gherkin and capers very fine, add them to the dressing, and it is ready for use. You may add a half teaspoonful of powdered coriander seed, or one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar. Serve with smelts, lobster chops, or cold meat dishes.
A cold compound sauce that is really just an assembly job, so its success rests entirely on the mayonnaise and on how dry you get the chopped pickles.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseThe printed page gives half a pint (one cup) of mayonnaise, which is what the text now reads and which works as a base for the chopped pickles. The line "I gherkin" is the compositor's capital I standing in for the numeral 1. Scale the olives, gherkin and capers up if you make a larger quantity of dressing.
- Drain and blot everythingOlives, gherkin and capers all carry brine, and brine will thin mayonnaise until it weeps. Chop them fine, then press them in a towel before folding them in, otherwise the sauce breaks on the plate.
- OlivesGreen olives in brine, pitted, is the likely intent; the recipe specifies no variety. Three olives is a token amount by modern taste; a tablespoon of chopped olive to a cup of mayonnaise is nearer what most palates now expect.
- GherkinA small sour pickled cucumber, not the sweet gherkin sold in American jars. Cornichons are the closest thing on a modern shelf; sweet pickle will make the sauce cloying.
- Powdered coriander seedAn unusual choice for this sauce, and easy to overdo. Half a teaspoon in a cup of mayonnaise is assertive; the tarragon vinegar alternative is the one that survived into standard practice.
- Smelts and lobster chopsSmelts were a cheap small fish fried whole. "Lobster chops" are a Victorian croquette — chopped lobster bound with thick sauce, shaped, breaded and fried, sometimes with a claw tip stuck in to suggest a chop bone. Any fried fish or shellfish serves the same purpose.
- Mayonnaise baseIf you make the dressing yourself it will be raw-egg mayonnaise; use pasteurised eggs, keep it cold, and do not serve it to anyone who should avoid raw egg. Commercial mayonnaise is acidified and is the safer base in warm weather.
- Yield and holdingA cup of finished sauce serves six to eight alongside fish. It improves after an hour in the refrigerator and holds two days; after that the pickle liquid loosens it.
Sauce tartare is a French kitchen sauce whose name is generally traced to the nineteenth-century European taste for calling sharp, piquant preparations "à la tartare" after the Tartars — a label applied loosely to anything thought fierce or unrefined, and some have linked the same conceit to steak tartare, though that connection is disputed. In its various codified forms it settled into a cold mayonnaise-based sauce, and by the time this book was printed it had become an English and American standard for fried fish. Its usefulness in warm weather is the point: a cold emulsified sauce needed no fire to finish, could be made in the morning and kept on ice, and turned yesterday's cold meat into something worth putting on a summer table.