Make a mayonnaise with three hard boiled egg-yolks, one gill of veloute, (No. 415) a pinch of ground mustard, salt, and sweet oil; stir into it gradually two spoonfuls of English anchovy essence; the same of Harvey sauce, and the same of Worcestershire sauce, so as to give the tartar a fine dark color.
An emulsion built on cooked yolks rather than raw, then darkened with three bottled sauces. It behaves less like modern tartar sauce and more like a thick remoulade, and one of its ingredients no longer exists on shelves.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full working record of the restaurant's kitchen, which is why the book carries two tartar sauces in sequence — No. 631 in the French manner, and this one "à l'Anglaise." What makes it English in his eyes is not technique but the bottle rack: anchovy essence, Harvey sauce and Worcestershire were the three pillars of Victorian British seasoning, all descendants of the fermented fish and soy condiments that reached Britain through the East India trade. Harvey's, sold commercially from the late eighteenth century onward, was as familiar then as Worcestershire is now and has since vanished almost completely. The name tartare is generally traced to the nineteenth-century French fashion for labelling sharp, mustard-spiked cold sauces after the Tartars, a piece of culinary exoticism with no connection to any Central Asian dish; note that Ranhofer's version contains no capers, gherkins or onion at all, the additions that define the sauce on a fish-and-chip counter today.