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Sauce Tartare
To one cup of mayonnaise dressing add one tablespoon each of finely chopped parsley, finely chopped olives, finely chopped pickle, and one teaspoon finely chopped chives. 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons onion 2 tablespoons carrot 4 tablespoons flour
A short, workable formula that assumes you already have mayonnaise on hand — Lowney's gives it earlier in the same chapter. Note that the four lines of butter, onion, carrot and flour at the end belong to the next recipe in the book; they are a typesetting spillover, almost certainly the start of a brown sauce, and have nothing to do with the tartare.
- "Mayonnaise dressing"In this period the phrase usually means true mayonnaise — egg yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon — rather than a boiled or cooked salad dressing, though cooked dressings did circulate under similar names. A cup of commercial mayonnaise works; if you make your own and are serving anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized egg.
- Drain everythingChopped pickle and olives carry brine, and excess liquid will thin a mayonnaise and can break it. Chop fine, then press the pickings in a towel or fine sieve before folding them in.
- PickleAn early-1900s cook reaching for "pickle" most likely meant a cucumber pickle, and a sour or sweet-sour type is the probable intent, though dill pickles existed too. Cornichons or gherkins are a close match; skip bread-and-butter slices unless you want a sweet sauce.
- OlivesGreen olives in brine, pitted. Canned black California olives were a comparatively recent product around this time, and are milder; they will also dull the colour.
- ChivesOne teaspoon is deliberately restrained — the chives are there for a faint onion note behind the pickle, not as a flavor of their own. Fresh only; dried chive turns to grit in a cold sauce.
- No capersMany modern tartares include capers and lemon. This version does not, and it will taste rounder and less sharp than what commonly comes with fish today. A squeeze of lemon at the end brings it closer if that is what you expect.
- Rest itFold, cover, and give it half an hour in the refrigerator so the pickle and parsley bleed into the base. Use within two or three days.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups — enough for six to eight servings of fried fish or cold meat.
Sauce tartare reaches English cookbooks from French practice of the nineteenth century, where a cold mayonnaise-based sauce bulked out with chopped pickled things was standard with fried fish and cold meats; the name is generally traced to the vague nineteenth-century European use of "à la tartare" for anything served sharp, coarse or cold, rather than to any actual Tatar dish. Its appearance in a chocolate company's cookbook is less odd than it looks: Walter M. Lowney's Boston firm issued the book as promotional literature, and the sauce section sits alongside fudge and cocoa frosting. What the entry really records is how familiar mayonnaise was assumed to be — the recipe does not bother to teach it, it simply assumes a cup of it is waiting.