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Piquante Sauce with Egg
Take some anchovy paste--one tablespoon, two tablespoons of chopped parsley, some capers and chopped pickles, one teaspoon of French mustard, and the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs. Work this all together into a paste, then add three tablespoons of olive-oil and two or three of vinegar and a pinch of salt and pepper. This sauce is good with both meat and fish.
A cold pounded sauce in the salsa verde family, built on hard yolks rather than raw ones, so it needs no emulsifying skill and keeps well. The whole thing takes ten minutes with a bowl and a fork.
- Work the paste firstThe hinge is getting the yolks, anchovy and mustard smooth before any liquid goes in. Add the oil to a loose mixture and it will stay grainy and separate in the dish.
- French mustardIn a 1912 book this most likely means a smooth French prepared mustard of the Dijon type rather than the yellow American kind. Plain Dijon is the safe choice.
- Anchovy pasteTubed anchovy paste still exists and works directly. Roughly five or six oil-packed fillets, mashed, can stand in for the tablespoon of paste.
- Capers and picklesQuantities are left open: about a tablespoon of each, chopped fine, suits the rest. Salt-packed capers should be rinsed and the pickles should be sharp cornichons or gherkins rather than anything sweet.
- The oil-to-vinegar ratioThree tablespoons oil to two or three of vinegar is far sharper than a modern vinaigrette. Start with one tablespoon of vinegar, taste, and go up from there; red wine vinegar is the likeliest intent.
- Salt last, if at allAnchovy, capers and pickles are all salted. Season only after the sauce is assembled and tasted.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly three-quarters of a cup, depending on how much caper and pickle goes in; enough for four to six servings. It holds three or four days covered in the fridge; let it come back to room temperature and stir before serving with cold roast meat, boiled beef or poached fish.
This is a piquant sauce in its household form, a first cousin of the green sauces served the length of the peninsula with bollito misto and cold fish. The pounded hard yolk is the old binding trick, common across European cookery long before mayonnaise became a domestic staple, and it does the same job as raw yolk without the whisking. The recipe comes from Simple Italian Cookery, published in 1912 under the pen name Antonia Isola by Mabel Earl McGinnis, an American who had lived in Italy and wrote to introduce Italian home cooking to English-speaking kitchens; the terse, quantity-light style here is typical of the book, which assumes a cook who will taste and adjust rather than measure. Anchovy paste and bottled French mustard were both readily bought in American groceries by then.