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Vinaigrette Sauce
1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar 2 tablespoons cider vinegar 6 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon chopped pickles 1 tablespoon chopped green pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon chopped chives Mix ingredients in order given. 1/2 teaspoon mustard
A cold vinaigrette in the older sense: not a salad dressing but a sharp sauce to spoon over poached fish, boiled beef, cold tongue or asparagus. The layout in the original is garbled, with the mustard stranded after the method.
- Read the ingredient list firstThe half teaspoon of mustard printed after "Mix ingredients in order given" reads as a stray ingredient rather than a final step. If it is dry mustard, whisk it into the vinegars before the oil so it dissolves and helps hold the emulsion; prepared mustard can be worked in the same way.
- RatioThree tablespoons vinegar to six of oil is 1:2, noticeably sharper than the modern 1:3. Taste it against whatever it is dressing and add oil by the spoonful if it bites.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few bruised tarragon sprigs in cider or white wine vinegar for a week. If you have none, substitute cider vinegar and add a pinch of chopped fresh tarragon.
- Pickles"Pickles" here most likely means small sour cucumber pickles, closer to cornichons or gherkins than to sweet bread-and-butter slices. Sweet pickles will throw the balance.
- Green pepperA raw green bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped. It is there for crunch and a faint bitterness, not heat.
- Olive oilOlive oil sold in America at this period was often mild, and could well be stale by the time it was used. A grassy modern extra-virgin will dominate a delicate fish; a moderate oil suits the sauce better.
- Mixing and holdingWhisk hard or shake in a jar; with chopped solids suspended in it, the sauce separates within minutes and needs shaking again at the table. Make it an hour ahead so the aromatics soften, but add the parsley and chives near serving so they stay green.
- YieldAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough to dress four to six servings of cold fish or vegetables.
Vinaigrette entered English cookery writing from the French kitchen as a name for a cold sauce of vinegar, oil and chopped seasonings, and nineteenth-century cookbooks list it among the sauces for fish and boiled meats rather than among salad dressings. The version here is a distinctly American reading of it: cider vinegar instead of wine vinegar, and chopped green bell pepper alongside the pickles and herbs. The habit of naming each ingredient in a measured column, then giving a one-line method, is characteristic of the form, though as the stray line of mustard here shows, the typesetting did not always cooperate.