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Sauce Tartare
1/2 pint (1 cup) mayonnaise sauce 1 tablespoonful chopped pickles 1 teaspoonful chopped chives 1 tablespoonful chopped 1 tablespoonful chopped olives capers 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Put the mayonnaise dressing into an earthenware bowl, then mix in all the other ingredients.
A cold compound sauce built on mayonnaise, mixed rather than cooked. The whole job is chopping fine and mixing thoroughly.
- The measurementsThe recipe itself glosses half a pint as one cup, so one cup of mayonnaise carries something like four to five tablespoons of chopped additions (the ingredient list is partly garbled). That is a heavily loaded sauce by modern standards; start with half the pickles and capers if you want the mayonnaise to stay the dominant flavour.
- Mayonnaise sauceIn a book of this vintage this means true made mayonnaise, thick with oil and sharpened with vinegar or lemon. Commercial jarred mayonnaise works, though it is sweeter and softer, so add a squeeze of lemon to bring the sauce back into balance.
- PicklesMost likely a small sour cucumber in vinegar, closer to a cornichon or a dill gherkin than to sweet pickle. Sweet pickle relish will push the sauce in the wrong direction.
- Chop, then dryPickles, capers and olives all carry brine. Chop them fine, then press them in a cloth or paper towel before folding in, or the sauce may loosen and weep as it stands.
- The earthenware bowlPossibly to avoid metal, which could taint an acid sauce, though the recipe gives no reason. Glass, ceramic or stainless steel is fine now; only unlined copper or aluminium is worth avoiding.
- Resting and keepingLet it stand covered in the refrigerator half an hour so the chives and parsley perfume the base. Use within two or three days, and stir before serving.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside fried fish, croquettes or cold meat.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, where a base sauce was varied by additions rather than remade from scratch. The name is generally traced to the vague nineteenth-century European use of " a la tartare" for things sharp, rough or highly seasoned, with no real connection to the Tatar peoples; classic French practice sometimes built it on hard-boiled egg yolk rather than whole mayonnaise, and it is often paired with mustard and chives.