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Sauce Tartare
1 teaspoon powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Yolks 2 eggs ½ cup olive oil 1½ tablespoons vinegar
What survives here is the ingredient list for a mayonnaise base; Farmer expected the reader to know the mayonnaise method from earlier in the sauce chapter, and to add the chopped pickles and capers that make it tartare. The points below fill in both.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropWith two yolks and half a cup of oil, the emulsion is easy to build and easy to break. Whisk the yolks with the salt, sugar and cayenne, then add oil literally a few drops at a time until the mixture thickens and takes on a gloss; only then move to a thin steady stream.
- Vinegar at the end, and as a thinnerHold the vinegar back until the sauce is thick, then beat it in to loosen and season. If the sauce stiffens too much partway through, a few drops of the vinegar will slacken it and let it take more oil.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn the 1890s the term generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, and would not have had the cornstarch that modern confectioners' sugar carries. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match; ordinary granulated dissolves well enough in the yolks.
- What makes it tartareThe list is plain mayonnaise. To finish it as tartare sauce, fold in about two tablespoons total of finely chopped capers, gherkins or cucumber pickle, and a little onion or shallot, all squeezed dry so they do not thin the emulsion. Chopped parsley or tarragon is traditional.
- Olive oil choiceA modern robust extra-virgin can taste bitter when beaten into an emulsion; use a light olive oil, or cut a fruity oil half and half with a neutral one.
- Raw yolksNothing in this sauce is cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving it to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, keep it refrigerated, and use within three or four days.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk, or a teaspoon of the finished sauce, in a clean bowl and beat the split mixture into it drop by drop.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup, enough for four to six servings of fried fish or cold meat.
Sauce tartare is mayonnaise sharpened with something pickled, and its name is generally traced to the French taste for labelling anything brisk or pungent à la tartare, after the Tartars — a piece of culinary shorthand rather than any documented origin. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, mayonnaise and its offspring were fixtures of American genteel cookery, taught as a set of proportions to be memorized once and varied thereafter; that is exactly why this entry is a bare list, sitting among the fish and meat sauces with the method assumed. Making it by hand with a fork or a wire whisk was ordinary domestic work in the 1890s, decades before the electric blender turned a ten-minute exercise in patience into a twenty-second one.