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Sauce Tartare
One-half pint mayonnaise dressing, three olives, one gherkin, one tablespoonful of capers, one teaspoonful of parsley, one onion if liked. Chop the olives, gherkin, capers, parsley and onion very fine, add them to the mayonnaise dressing, and it is ready for use.
A cold compound sauce that is really just mayonnaise plus chopped pickled things. The proportions are sound; the only real work is controlling moisture.
- Half a pintOne cup of mayonnaise. With the chopped additions the recipe yields about 1 1/4 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside fried or cold fish.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn this period that ordinarily meant a hand-beaten oil-and-egg-yolk mayonnaise, uncooked. If you want the period texture, make it fresh with pasteurized eggs; otherwise a good commercial jarred mayonnaise behaves the same way here.
- Drain everything, then dry itThe one thing that decides whether the sauce holds. Capers, gherkin and olives all carry brine, and the water breaks a mayonnaise into a thin grey slick. Chop them, press them in a towel, and only then fold them in.
- GherkinA small sour pickled cucumber, not the sweet gherkin sold in American supermarkets. A cornichon is the closest thing; sweet pickle will throw the sauce off entirely.
- OlivesThree whole green olives in brine, pitted before chopping. Olive sizes vary widely, so err on the small side and taste before adding more salt of any kind.
- The onion"one onion if liked" is unspecified as to size, and a whole one would overwhelm a single cup of mayonnaise. Use a tablespoon of grated onion or a small minced shallot, and grate rather than chop so no raw crunch remains.
- Rest before servingGive it half an hour in the refrigerator. The capers and parsley need time to bleed into the base, and the sauce tastes flat straight after mixing.
- KeepingCovered and chilled, a couple of days if made with fresh mayonnaise, a little longer with a commercial base. The pickled solids continue to weep, loosening the sauce.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and the name is generally traced to the old European habit of attaching "Tartar" to anything thought fierce or highly seasoned, though no one has ever pinned the naming down to a person or date. Its appearance in a salad book is not a stretch: mayonnaise may well have been thought of as salad dressing first and sauce second, and a collection of salads would naturally gather the variations built on it -- tartare, remoulade and the rest -- as part of the same repertoire. The pairing with fried fish that Americans now take for granted was only one use among many; the same bowl went over cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs and boiled tongue.