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Parsley (Finely chopped shallot finely)
finely chopped ½ shallot, finely chopped ¼ teaspoon powdered tarragon or 1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar Mix mustard, sugar, salt, and cayenne; add yolks of eggs, and stir until thoroughly mixed, setting bowl in pan of icestir until thoroughly mixed, setting bowl in pan of icewater. Add oil, at first drop by drop, stirring with a wooden spoon or wire whisk. As mixture thickens, dilute with vinegar, when oil may be added more rapidly. Keep in cool place until ready to serve, then add remaining ingredients.
This is a cold emulsified sauce in the mayonnaise family — mustard, egg yolks and oil built up by hand, then finished with shallot and tarragon. The method survives intact; the ingredient quantities are the weak point.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyThe first spoonful of oil must go in literally drop by drop while the yolks are moving, or the emulsion will never take. Only once the mixture has visibly thickened and been loosened with vinegar can the oil go in a steady thin stream.
- Ice water under the bowlThe instruction to set the bowl in a pan of ice water is deliberate, not decoration: the sauce is served cold, and cooks of the period held that keeping everything cold helped a hand-beaten mayonnaise hold. Heat and too-fast addition of the oil are both common causes of a broken emulsion.
- "14 teaspoon" tarragonRead as a quarter teaspoon of powdered tarragon — the fraction has been flattened in printing. The stated alternative, one tablespoon of tarragon vinegar, is the more reliable measure and gives a cleaner flavour.
- Powdered tarragonDried tarragon on shelves today is usually leaf rather than powder, and leaf measures less concentrated by volume. Use about a teaspoon of crumbled dried leaf, or a tablespoon of chopped fresh, added at the end so the flavour stays bright.
- Proportions for the baseThe quantities of mustard, sugar, salt, cayenne, yolks, oil and vinegar are not given in full in this text. A working ratio for this style is two yolks, a teaspoon of dry mustard, a pinch each of sugar, salt and cayenne, up to a cup of oil, and vinegar to thin — added a teaspoon at a time.
- Wooden spoon or wire whiskBoth work, and either is preferable to a blender here: the small volume and the slow initial addition suit hand work. A narrow bowl helps keep the yolks and the first drops of oil in contact.
- EggsThe yolks are never heated. If the sauce is for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised yolk product.
- Yield and keepingA two-yolk batch with up to a cup of oil makes a little over a cup — enough for six to eight servings alongside fried or cold fish. Refrigerate and use within two days; the shallot and tarragon go dull and the emulsion loosens after that.
Sauces of this kind sit at the point where nineteenth-century American cookery absorbed French practice wholesale. The base is plain mayonnaise, which cookbooks of Fannie Farmer's era treated as a fundamental preparation to be mastered by hand and then varied endlessly; the additions of chopped shallot and tarragon push it toward the family of cold mayonnaise-based sauces served with fried, boiled or cold fish. Tarragon vinegar was a staple of the well-stocked pantry of the period precisely because fresh tarragon was seasonal and short-lived, and a bottle of the vinegar gave a cook the flavour year round. Such sauces say something about the era's expectations: plain boiled or fried protein was assumed, and the sauce was where interest and skill were meant to show.