Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Tartare Sauce
Tartare Sauce
Beat together the yolks of two eggs, one teacupful of oil, and three tablespoonfuls of vinegar; when well beaten, add one tablespoonful of mustard, one teaspoonful of sugar, one tablespoonful of chopped capers, the same quantity of chopped cucumber pickles, the juice of an onion, and one-half saltspoonful of pepper. This sauce can be used with meats served in jelly, also fried and broiled meats and fish.
This is a mayonnaise-based tartare sauce written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where the emulsion technique was assumed rather than explained. A few of the measures need translating, and the order of work matters more than the text lets on.
- Add the oil slowly, not all at once"Beat together" the yolks, oil and vinegar will break if taken literally. Whisk the yolks with a little of the vinegar first, then add the oil drop by drop until the emulsion takes, and only then work in the rest of the oil and vinegar. Once it is thick and glossy, the seasonings go in.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is not a fixed measure; period sources put it anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup of oil. Two yolks will carry that comfortably; if you want a stiffer sauce, go closer to a full cup.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Note that the recipe seasons with pepper only, so salt to taste at the end; the capers and pickles bring a fair amount already.
- MustardA tablespoon of dry mustard powder would be fierce; read this as prepared mustard. If you use powder, start with a teaspoon.
- Juice of an onionGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and squeeze the pulp in a cloth, or press a few slices in a garlic press. The point is onion flavour without pieces suspended in the sauce.
- Cucumber picklesCornichons or small sour gherkins, chopped fine and squeezed dry. Sweet pickle relish will push the sauce in a different direction, and the teaspoon of sugar already accounts for the sweetness the recipe wants.
- Raw yolksNothing here is cooked. If the sauce is for anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or shell eggs pasteurized in the shell. Keep it refrigerated and use within two or three days.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for six to eight servings alongside fried fish or cold meats.
Tartare sauce is generally traced to the French "à la tartare," a term often said to point to the Tartars, though the connection is traditional and unresolved and the association was decorative rather than culinary, a stock French shorthand for anything bracing or barbaric. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, the sauce had settled into the form recognizable today: mayonnaise cut with vinegar and mustard and studded with capers and pickles. Its placement here among the Waldorf kitchen's working formulas is telling: it belonged with the fried fish, the broiled chops, and the elaborate aspics and meats in jelly that were the pride of the period's cold larder.