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Sauce Tartare
This sauce is made like the above dressing, with the addition of chopped capers, olives, pickles, and parsley. Omit the cream.
Maître d'Hôtel Butter (for Steak and Broiled Fish) 3 tablespoonfuls but- 1 teaspoonful lemonter juice I full teaspoonful finely chopped parsley Cream the butter well, gradually beat in the lemon-juice, and finally add the chopped parsley.
Spread over the hot steak or fish just before serving.
Two short sauces run together here by the typesetter: a tartare built on a mayonnaise given earlier in the book, and a maître d'hôtel butter that stands on its own. The butter is complete as printed; the tartare needs the missing base.
- "The above dressing"This refers to the dressing printed immediately before this entry in the original book, which is not reproduced on this page. The additions and the instruction to omit the cream point to a mayonnaise or a cream-thinned salad dressing; any standard mayonnaise will serve as a base. Omitting the cream makes sense in a sauce already loosened by chopped pickles.
- Proportions for the tartareNone are given, as was common when a cook was expected to taste. For a cup of mayonnaise, start with a tablespoon each of capers, chopped olives, chopped pickles and parsley, then adjust. Drain and blot the pickles and capers first or the sauce will weep within the hour.
- PicklesNineteenth- and early twentieth-century American recipes calling simply for "pickles" usually meant small sour cucumber pickles or gherkins rather than sweet ones. Cornichons are the closest match; dill pickles work. Sweet pickle relish gives a quite different, later-style sauce.
- Raw egg in the baseUncooked mayonnaise carries the usual raw-egg risk. Use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated.
- The butter is a compound butterThree tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of lemon juice and a teaspoon of parsley makes enough for two or three steaks. The butter must be soft but not melted, or the lemon juice will not emulsify into it and the mixture will separate into greasy pools on the plate.
- Beat the acid in graduallyAdding all the lemon juice at once to creamed butter breaks it. Add a few drops at a time, working each in fully, exactly as the original says. The parsley goes in last so it stays green and distinct rather than bruising into the butter.
- Chilling and holdingRolled in parchment or plastic wrap and refrigerated, the butter keeps a week and freezes for months. Slice coins from the log and lay them on the hot steak or fish; the original's "spread over" assumes it is being made and used the same hour.
- YieldThe tartare, on a cup of mayonnaise, dresses fried fish or cold poultry for six. The butter dresses two to three portions.
Both sauces belong to the French repertoire that American household cookery absorbed wholesale in the second half of the nineteenth century, and both survive because they solve a problem this book is entirely about: making cold or reheated meat taste like something chosen rather than something left. Sauce tartare in the mayonnaise-with-capers sense is a nineteenth-century development whose first appearance is not securely fixed; the mayonnaise sharpened with capers, gherkins and herbs accompanied fried fish and cold meats, and the name is usually explained as a reference to the Tartars, though the connection is decorative rather than documented. Maître d'hôtel butter — literally the head steward's butter — is the simplest of the compound butters codified in French professional cooking, and its appearance in a leftovers manual shows how thoroughly restaurant technique had filtered into the American home kitchen. A cook with cold roast chicken and three tablespoons of butter had, between these two entries, both a cold sauce and a hot one.