Home › Catsups And Sauces › Tartare Sauce
Tartare Sauce
Yolks of two eggs, gill of salad-oil (or melted butter), salt-spoon salt, half a salt-spoon pepper, a table-spoon good cider vinegar, half tea-spoon mustard, a table-spoon of gherkins. Beat together in a small bowl lightly the vinegar and yolks, add to these, drop by drop, the salad-oil or melted butter, taking care to stir the same way all the time; when this is done, season the mixture with pepper, salt and mustard; add also the gherkins finely chopped (or capers may be substituted), and serve in a gravy boat with boiled salmon or cold meats.
This is a hand-beaten mayonnaise with chopped pickles folded in — the emulsion is the whole exercise, and everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyAdding the oil drop by drop is not fussiness; it is what keeps the emulsion from breaking. (Always stirring the same way is traditional advice rather than a physical necessity.) Start with a bare trickle and only increase the stream once the mixture has visibly thickened. If it splits, beat a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and dribble the broken sauce into it.
- GillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. Two yolks will comfortably carry that much oil and a little more.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so this calls for about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Season at the end and taste — gherkins bring their own salt and acid.
- Salad-oilIn the period this generally meant olive oil, often a mild one. Any neutral oil works; a strong modern extra-virgin can turn bitter under vigorous beating.
- The melted-butter optionButter emulsifies far less reliably than oil and the sauce will stiffen and dull in the refrigerator. Oil gives a sauce closer to what most cooks now expect from tartare.
- MustardHalf a teaspoon of prepared mustard, or dry mustard powder — both were in kitchens then. Dry mustard is the more effective emulsifier and is worth using whichever you finish with.
- Raw yolksThe eggs are never cooked. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated and use it within two days.
- Yield and servingAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six as an accompaniment. Chop the gherkins or capers fine and fold them in at the last moment so the sauce stays smooth rather than watery.
Sauce à la tartare is generally traced to French restaurant cookery of the earlier nineteenth century, where the name — like steak tartare later on — is often said to have invoked the Tatars of the Eurasian steppe as shorthand for something plain, sharp and uncooked, though the derivation is folk tradition rather than established fact, and there was no real culinary connection to them. What made it a household possibility rather than a chef's trick was the mayonnaise beneath it: an emulsion that needs nothing but a bowl, a fork and patience, and so travelled easily into American community cookbooks like this one. Its pairing here with boiled salmon and cold meats is telling — a cold, acid, pickle-flecked sauce seems to have been a common answer to leftover joints and to fish served at room temperature, at a time when a cook's repertoire of cold sauces mattered as much as her hot ones.