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Remoulade Sauce
Mix together in a basin two tablespoonfuls each of chopped anchovies that have been preserved in oil and capers, and add a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, one teaspoonful of dry mustard, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix the above ingredients with salad oil and a few drops of malt vinegar; one pinch of scraped garlic may be added if desired. The sauce is then ready for serving.
This is a loose, oil-based sauce rather than the thick mayonnaise-bound rémoulade most cooks expect today. The quantities of oil and vinegar are left to judgment, which is the one thing worth settling before you start.
- The oil is unmeasuredOscar gives no volume for the salad oil, only "a few drops" of vinegar. Start with about 1/2 cup of oil to the roughly 1/3 cup of solids and work up or down; you want a spoonable sauce, not a paste and not a dressing.
- Salad oilIn 1896 this meant a mild olive oil or, increasingly, cottonseed oil. Either a light olive oil or a neutral oil works; a strongly grassy extra-virgin will fight the anchovy.
- Bloom the mustardDry mustard develops its pungency on contact with cold liquid, and it needs about ten minutes. Stir the teaspoon of mustard into a little cold water first and let it stand, then add the vinegar and build the sauce around it, or the heat will stay flat and dusty.
- Salt last, if at allOil-packed anchovies and capers between them carry a great deal of salt. Mix, taste, and only then decide whether the sauce needs any more.
- Malt vinegarStill sold, and worth using here for its maltiness against the anchovy; cider vinegar is the closest substitute. Add it drop by drop, since the sauce is meant to stay rich rather than sharp.
- Scraped garlicScraping means dragging the cut clove across a blade or grater to produce a pulp with no chunks. A microplane does the same job. "One pinch" suggests no more than a trace.
- Rinse the capersCapers of the period were sold in vinegar or strong brine, or packed in salt. Modern brined capers benefit from a quick rinse and a squeeze dry before chopping, or the sauce turns watery.
- Yield and serviceAbout 3/4 cup, enough for four to six. It suits cold poached fish, shellfish, cold roast beef or hard-boiled eggs, and it will separate on standing, so whisk again before it goes to the table.
R traced to a Picard dialect word for horseradish (ramolas, from Latin armoracea), and older French kitchens built it on a base of mustard, herbs and anchovy worked into oil, much as here. The thick mayonnaise-bound version now standard in France, and the paprika-tinted pink sauce of New Orleans, both came later; Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen seems to have been working from the earlier, thinner idea, a cousin of ravigote and of the anchovy-and-caper sauces served with cold meat and fish. Sauces like this presumably mattered in a hotel that served enormous amounts of cold buffet food: one imagines them made in a basin, kept in the larder, and spooned out to order without further cooking. The anchovies "preserved in oil" are worth noticing as a detail of the period, when the alternative was a barrel of salt-cured fish that had to be filleted and soaked by hand.