Sauce Tartare
One cup of mayonnaise dressing; one tablespoon of chopped cucumber pickle; one tablespoon of capers; one teaspoon of onion juice. Make the mayonnaise rather more sour and with a little more mustard than for salad, and mix into it the capers and pickle. Grate one-half onion to secure the juice and add the amount required. Set on the ice until needed. The sauce should be quite thick when served.
A short, forgiving recipe that assumes you already have a bowl of mayonnaise on hand. The only real work is the seasoning balance.
- The hinge: sharper than salad mayonnaiseThe instruction to make the base "rather more sour and with a little more mustard" is the whole point of the sauce. If you are starting from jarred mayonnaise, whisk in about a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar and a half-teaspoon of Dijon per cup before anything else, then taste.
- Onion juiceGrating half an onion on a box grater and using the liquid gives sharpness without raw onion texture. Half an onion will yield more juice than the teaspoon called for; the recipe expects you to take only "the amount required." Pressing the grated pulp through a fine sieve is quicker than trying to catch juice on the grater.
- Cucumber pickleRead this as a sour cucumber pickle, not a sweet one. Cornichons or dill gherkins, chopped fine and blotted dry, are the right thing; sweet pickle relish will throw the acid balance the recipe is deliberately building.
- CapersDrain and chop them, and taste before adding salt. Brine-packed capers carry a good deal of salt into a cup of already-seasoned mayonnaise; salt-packed ones should be rinsed and soaked briefly.
- Keeping it thickChopped pickle and capers weep. Blotting both on a towel, and adding the onion juice a few drops at a time, keeps the sauce from slackening in the bowl.
- "Set on the ice"The refrigerator. An hour is enough for the flavors to come together. If you make the mayonnaise yourself from raw yolks, treat it as a same-day sauce and keep it cold throughout; pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice for an uncooked emulsion.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for four to six servings alongside fried fish or cold meat.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, close cousin to r traditional