No. 628

Remoulade Sauce with Fine Herbs

Sauce Remoulade aux Fines Herbes

Put into a bowl one tablespoonful of mustard, salt, pepper and a raw egg-yolk; beat this up with a wooden spatula and pour very slowly into it from six to eight spoonfuls of oil, also two of vinegar and one tablespoonful of Chili vinegar; add finely chopped parsley, chervil and tarragon.

← No. 627 Remoulade Sauce with Anchovies Cold Sauces No. 629 Rosseberry Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a hand-built mayonnaise with mustard and fresh herbs — Ranhofer assumes you already know how to bring an emulsion together, so the whole recipe hangs on the speed at which the oil goes in.

The hinge: pour slower than feels necessaryWith a single yolk, the first spoonful of oil should go in drop by drop while you work the spatula continuously; only once the mixture has visibly thickened can you move to a thin stream. Added too fast, it breaks, and the fix is to start with a fresh yolk and beat the split sauce into it a little at a time.
Chili vinegarA nineteenth-century staple: vinegar steeped with hot red peppers, sold bottled or made at home. A dash of a Louisiana-style pepper sauce or a wine vinegar infused with dried chilies stands in for it. It is there for heat and acidity, not for tomato-based chili flavour.
MustardA tablespoon of mustard against one yolk means smooth prepared Dijon-type mustard, not dry English mustard powder, which at that volume would be brutal. The mustard also helps stabilise the emulsion, which is why it goes in first.
Fines herbesParsley, chervil and tarragon here, with chives usually the fourth in the classical set. Chop them just before use and fold them in at the end — the tarragon in particular loses its perfume quickly, and chopping in advance bruises the parsley into a dull green.
OilPeriod kitchens used mild olive oil. A modern peppery extra-virgin will dominate the herbs; a light olive oil or a neutral oil with a spoonful of good olive oil for flavour is closer to the intent.
EggsThe yolk is never cooked. Pasteurised eggs in the shell, or pasteurised yolks, are the sensible choice for anyone serving this to children, pregnant women or older guests.
Yield and useOne yolk gives a small bowlful, enough for about four as a dip or coating sauce. It is a cold sauce for cold meats, shellfish, fried fish or celery root, and it keeps two or three days refrigerated, though the herbs fade after the first day.

A Little History

Remoulade in the French repertoire is not one sauce but a family: a mustard-sharpened cold emulsion that takes its character from whatever is folded in at the end, which is why Ranhofer files this one immediately after a version with anchovies. The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its cold-sauce chapter is essentially a catalogue of variations built on the same mayonnaise base — useful in a restaurant where a garde-manger could turn out a dozen different sauces from one bowl of emulsion. The word rémoulade is generally traced to a dialect term for horseradish or black radish, which points to the older, rougher form of the sauce before it settled into a mayonnaise derivative; the fines herbes combination of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives was already fixed convention by Ranhofer's day. Chili vinegar, now largely forgotten, was a common bottled condiment in nineteenth-century Anglo-American and Creole kitchens alike, and its appearance here is a small reminder that Delmonico's French cooking was being done with American pantry goods.