No. 627

Remoulade Sauce with Anchovies

Sauce Remoulade aux Anchois

Pound four hard boiled egg-yolk; add to them four raw egg-yolks, two spoonfuls of mustard and eight anchovies; rub all through a sieve, and put the mixture into a vessel to work and stir in gradually one pint of oil and a half gill of vinegar, season with very little salt and pepper, and then add three chopped and blanched shallots, some parsley and two ounces of chopped capers.

← No. 626 Remoulade Sauce Vert-Pre Cold Sauces No. 628 Remoulade Sauce with Fine Herbs →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a mayonnaise built on both cooked and raw yolks, with anchovy standing in for much of the salt. The cooked yolks make it far more forgiving than a plain mayonnaise, but the oil still has to go in slowly.

Add the oil drop by drop at firstThe whole sauce hinges on this. Work the yolk-mustard-anchovy paste until smooth, then dribble the pint (2 cups) of oil in a thread while stirring constantly; only once it has visibly thickened can you pour in a steady stream. The four sieved hard-boiled yolks act as a buffer and make the emulsion harder to break than a straight mayonnaise, but they do not excuse haste.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of vinegar is 4 tablespoons. A "spoonful" in Ranhofer is generally taken to be a tablespoon, so two spoonfuls of mustard is about 2 tablespoons — a smooth mustard rather than a coarse grainy one, which will not pass easily through the sieve.
Anchovies"Eight anchovies" is ambiguous; in a book of this date it most likely means eight whole salt-cured fish, though it can be read as eight fillets. Salt-packed anchovies should be rinsed, boned and dried first; oil-packed fillets can go in as they are. Taste before adding any salt at all — between the anchovies and the capers the sauce is usually seasoned already, which is why the original says "very little."
Sieve, or use a machineRubbing the yolks, mustard and anchovies through a sieve is what keeps the finished sauce smooth. A food processor or a stick blender in a tall jar does the same job in seconds, and will also carry the emulsion for you.
Blanching the shallotsThirty seconds in boiling water, then drained and squeezed dry, takes the raw bite out of the shallots and stops them from weeping liquid into the sauce. Do not skip the drying step.
Raw yolksThe four raw yolks are never heated. If the sauce is for anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized yolks in a carton. Keep it refrigerated and use it within two or three days; the vinegar and salt help but do not preserve it.
Yield and useThe pint of oil alone is 2 cups, and with the vinegar, yolks, capers and aromatics the finished sauce comes to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups — a generous amount by modern standards; half the recipe is plenty for a dinner. Cold sauces of this kind were served with cold boiled beef, poached fish, shellfish and cold poultry, and it also serves as a dressing for celery root or shredded cabbage.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its cold sauce chapter is arranged as a series rather than a list: a base rémoulade, then variants numbered in sequence — vert-pré with green herbs at No. 626, this anchovy version at 627, fine herbs at 628. Rémoulade itself is an old French kitchen word whose origin is uncertain; one commonly cited suggestion traces it to a dialect term for horseradish (Picard ramolas, usually linked to Latin armoracia), though this remains conjectural. The double-yolk technique here — hard-boiled yolks sieved together with raw ones — turns up in other professional recipes of the period, and cooked yolks do make an emulsion harder to break, though Ranhofer gives no reason for it; the anchovy reflects the period's steady use of salted fish as a background seasoning rather than a flavor announced on the menu.