Tartare Sauce
1/2 cup Mayonnaise dressing 1/2 tablespoon capers 1/2 tablespoon chopped olives 1/2 tablespoon chopped pickle Chop the capers, olives and pickle very fine and add them to the dressing. Serve with fried fish or cold meat dishes.
A minimal tartare sauce: mayonnaise plus three chopped pickled things, in equal measure. The whole outcome rests on how finely and how dryly you chop them.
- The hinge: chop fine, then dryCapers, olives and pickle all carry brine, and that liquid will gradually thin mayonnaise. Mince them very fine as directed, and blotting them on a towel before folding in will help keep the sauce thick.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a cup of mayonnaise with about 1 1/2 tablespoons of solids makes roughly a generous 1/2 cup of sauce, enough for two to three servings of fried fish. It scales up in exact proportion.
- Which pickleIn an American book of this period 'chopped pickle' most likely means a cucumber pickle in vinegar brine, the sour or dill sort, rather than the sweet gherkins now often sold under that name. Sweet pickle will push the sauce toward a relish dressing.
- OlivesPlain brined green olives, stoned and minced, are the likeliest reading. Pimiento-stuffed olives will work but add red flecks and a little sweetness.
- The mayonnaiseThe 'Mayonnaise dressing' called for is a house-made dressing from elsewhere in the book, not a jarred product. If you make one yourself from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this sauce is cooked.
- Rest before servingTwenty minutes in the refrigerator lets the caper and pickle flavor move into the dressing. Beyond a day the solids continue to weep and the sauce loosens; make it the day you want it.
- Modern additions the recipe omitsThere is no onion, shallot, parsley, mustard or lemon here. Other versions of the sauce, French ones included, carry some of these; this one does not, and it works as written.
Tartare sauce reached English and American cookery from nineteenth-century French practice, where sauce tartare was mayonnaise sharpened with capers, pickles and herbs; the name is generally traced to the older culinary use of "à la tartare" for dishes served with a pungent cold sauce, a vague gesture at the Tartars rather than any actual Central Asian dish. Mayonnaise was the workhorse of the cold-sauce chapter, the same base varied by whatever was in the pickle jar. The pairing with fried fish, noted almost in passing here, is the one that stuck.