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Tartar Sauce No. 2
1/2 cup thick white sauce. 1/2 cup oil mayonnaise. 1 tablespoon chopped leek. 2 full tablespoons butter. 1 heaping tablespoon flour. 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 1 teaspoon minced parsley 1 cup water or white stock. Put butter in saucepan, add flour, stir until smooth, add stock and cook until it thickens. Season with salt and pepper. Add half spoon lemon juice if you like.
The ingredient list and the method belong to two different halves of this recipe: the butter, flour and stock are the thick white sauce named at the top, and the method tells you only how to make that. Once it is cold, fold it into the mayonnaise with the leek, parsley and lemon juice.
- Cool the white sauce firstThis is the hinge. Folding warm sauce into mayonnaise will break the emulsion and leave you with oily streaks. Spread the sauce in a shallow dish, cover, and chill it to room temperature or colder before combining.
- Reading the quantitiesTwo tablespoons butter with a heaping tablespoon flour and one cup liquid is a light proportion for something the ingredient list calls a thick white sauce; it makes roughly a cup, of which you use half. The recipe never says what to do with the remainder, so halve the roux and liquid if you want no leftovers, or use less liquid if you want it genuinely thick.
- The lemon juice appears twiceOne teaspoon is listed among the ingredients for the finished sauce; the method separately offers "half spoon" in the white sauce. Add it to the finished sauce and skip it in the base, or the two together will read sharp.
- Oil mayonnaiseThe qualifier suggests a true oil-and-egg mayonnaise as distinct from a cooked or flour-thickened dressing. A good jarred mayonnaise stands in exactly; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing here is cooked after mixing.
- LeekUse only the white and pale green, minced very fine. A tablespoon of raw leek is assertive at first and softens after an hour in the refrigerator, so make the sauce ahead.
- No pickle or caperPickle, caper or olive is the conventional inclusion in tartar sauce. This version relies on leek and parsley alone, which is why the seasoning matters: salt it in the base and taste again after the mayonnaise goes in.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup, enough for four to six portions of fried or broiled fish. Keep it covered and cold and use it within two days.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where dishes served à la tartare generally meant something breaded and fried and sent out with a sharp cold sauce; the name is usually traced to the vague European use of "Tartar" for anything from the eastern steppes, rather than to any specific dish. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and assembled this book around 1920, when household economy was still a habit left over from wartime, and her method here shows it: rather than build the sauce on mayonnaise alone, she stretches a half cup of it with an equal amount of flour-thickened white sauce made on water or stock. The result is cheaper and milder than straight mayonnaise.