Tartan Sauce
One mustardspoon of mixed mustard, salt and cayenne to the taste. The latter highly.
Yolk of one raw egg, sweet-oil added very slowly, until the quantity is made that is desired; thin with a little vinegar.
Take two small cucumber pickles, two full teaspoonfuls capers, three small sprigs parsley, and one small shaleot or leek. Chop all fine, and stir into the sauce about an hour before serving. If very thick, add a tablespoonful cold water. This quantity will serve eight persons-is good with trout, veal cutlets, and oysters.--Miss E. S
This is sauce tartare under a garbled name: a hand-built mayonnaise, sharply seasoned, with pickles and herbs folded in at the end. Everything depends on the emulsion.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropWith one yolk you can carry roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of oil, but only if the first few tablespoons go in a drop at a time while you whisk constantly. Pour faster than the yolk can absorb and the sauce breaks; if it does, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and whisk the broken mixture into it slowly.
- A mustardspoonA small spoon from a Victorian condiment set, usually holding somewhere around half a teaspoon. "Mixed mustard" means mustard already made up with liquid, so prepared Dijon or English mustard is the right substitute, not dry powder.
- Sweet-oilNineteenth-century shorthand for olive oil, generally a milder-tasting table oil than the peppery extra-virgin sold now. A neutral oil, or half olive and half neutral, gives a result closer to what was intended; all extra-virgin can turn bitter when whisked hard.
- ShaleotA shallot. One small shallot, finely minced, or an equal amount of the white of a leek as the recipe allows.
- Cucumber pickles and capersSmall sour pickles, not sweet ones. Cornichons or a firm dill gherkin are right; bread-and-butter pickles will make the sauce cloying. Drain and squeeze the capers so their brine does not thin the emulsion.
- Raw yolkThe yolk is never cooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or eggs you trust, keep the sauce refrigerated, and use it the day it is made.
- The hour's restNot idle time. The shallot and pickle need it to bleed their acidity through the sauce; made and served immediately it tastes like mayonnaise with things in it.
- Cayenne "highly"The original wants real heat, which suits oysters and fried fish. Season it in stages and taste after the resting hour, since the pickles and capers bring their own salt.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the amount of oil to the cook, so the finished quantity is not fixed; it simply states that what is made will serve eight as an accompaniment.
"Tartan" here is almost certainly a printer's or copyist's slip for tartare, the French sauce of mayonnaise sharpened with capers, gherkins, shallot and herbs; the name is generally traced to the old European habit of attaching "a la tartare" to anything served with a fierce, piquant seasoning. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia households and printed them with their donors' initials, which is why this one closes with "Miss E. S." rather than a headnote. That a private cook was expected to build a mayonnaise by hand, drop by drop, with nothing but a bowl and a fork or whisk, says a good deal about the skill assumed of a nineteenth-century kitchen; bottled mayonnaise was still decades away. The recipe suggests it be served with trout, veal cutlets and oysters.