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Remoulade Sauce
Chop very fine two branches fresh parsley, two of chives, twelve capers, two anchovies in oil, one medium vinegar pickle, one shallot and one-quarter bean garlic. Place all in a bowl, adding half teaspoon French mustard, a saltspoon salt and one egg yolk; pour in one tablespoon tarragon vinegar. Briskly mix the whole well together with a whisk, then drop in, little by little, one gill olive oil, briskly whisking while adding it. See that the sauce is of same consistency as mayonnaise. Use as required.
A cold emulsified sauce built exactly like mayonnaise, with the aromatics mixed in before the oil rather than stirred in at the end. The measurements are pre-metric and a few of the terms are literal translations from French.
- A gill of oilA gill is 4 fluid ounces, half a cup (an imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces). That is a generous but manageable amount for one yolk; add it slowly at the start, a teaspoon at a time until the emulsion takes, then in a thin stream.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Season again at the end, since the anchovies, capers and pickle all bring salt of their own.
- "One-quarter bean garlic"Apparently a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail, gousse meaning a pod or husk as well as a clove of garlic. A quarter clove is a very small amount; grate or mash it to a paste so no fragment stays whole.
- French mustardDijon, smooth and sharp, not the sweetened yellow mustard sold as prepared mustard in the United States. It also helps stabilise the emulsion.
- Vinegar pickleA small pickle put up in vinegar, such as a gherkin or cornichon, rather than a sweet pickle. Chop it fine and press out the brine so the sauce does not thin.
- Two branches of parsley and chivesA branch is a sprig. The recipe does not specify a variety of parsley; use the leaves with the stems discarded, and roughly a tablespoon of chives once chopped.
- Everything must be dry and fineWater is what breaks this sauce. Blot the capers, anchovies and pickle, and chop them to a near-paste; coarse pieces sit in the sauce rather than flavouring it.
- Raw yolkThe yolk is never heated. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use a pasteurised egg.
- YieldRoughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six servings alongside cold meat, shellfish, fried fish or celeriac.
Rémoulade is one of the classic cold sauces of French cookery, a mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, capers, anchovy, pickle and herbs; the name is generally traced to a dialect word for horseradish, and older versions were more pungent than the herb-and-caper version standardised in nineteenth-century professional kitchens. The sauce travelled well and mutated as it went — Danish remoulade turned sweet and yellow, and New Orleans built its own paprika-and-Creole-mustard version — but the method here is aromatics first and oil beaten in by hand.