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Sauce Mayonnaise with Tarragon
Prepare a mayonnaise, only substituting same quantity of tarragon vinegar for the other, and when finished add a half teaspoon freshly chopped tarragon leaves, mix well and serve in a cold sauce bowl.
A derivative sauce that assumes you already have the book's plain mayonnaise in front of you; the only real work is the substitution of vinegars and the restraint with the herb.
- The base it refers toThe book's plain mayonnaise, whose proportions this entry assumes rather than states; period recipes typically run to a couple of egg yolks, a cup or so of oil, a small quantity of vinegar and seasoning. Here the vinegar alone changes, so the tarragon flavour comes in twice: once dissolved in the acid, once as leaf.
- Tarragon vinegarSold in most supermarkets, but easily made by steeping a generous handful of fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week or two and straining. Cider vinegar is too assertive here; use a white wine base so the herb reads clearly.
- The hinge is the acid, not the herbThe vinegar supplies the water phase that thins the sauce and helps hold the emulsion together, while the yolk does the emulsifying. Add it in the same small quantity as the base recipe calls for, with the yolks, and add the oil slowly. Stirring extra vinegar into a finished mayonnaise at the end can loosen it.
- French tarragon onlyRussian tarragon looks similar and tastes of almost nothing. Dried tarragon is a poor substitute in an uncooked sauce; if that is all you have, steep it in the vinegar rather than stirring it in as leaf.
- Half a teaspoon is deliberateChopped tarragon carries anise strongly and grows more insistent as the sauce sits. Chop it fine at the last moment, since bruised leaves darken quickly against pale mayonnaise.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is never heated. For anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised yolk.
- Yield and keepingOn the assumed base of two yolks and a cup of oil, roughly 1¼ cups, enough for about six as a sauce for cold salmon, chicken, asparagus or hard-boiled eggs. Refrigerate and use within two or three days; the tarragon fades first.
- The cold bowlNot decoration. The recipe calls for it, and warmth does an emulsion of this sort no favours, so chill the serving dish and keep the sauce cold until it goes to the table.
Tarragon vinegar was one of the standard flavoured vinegars of the nineteenth-century larder, kept alongside chilli and garlic vinegars. Mayonnaise itself arrives in French cookery in the early nineteenth century, and by the time Auguste Escoffier codified the classical repertoire it existed chiefly as a parent sauce, with named children made by changing one element at a time — mustard, herbs, gelatine, cream. This entry is exactly that habit of mind: an instruction so short it presumes the reader has the mother sauce by heart. Tarragon's association with cold poultry and fish is long-standing in French practice, and the herb recurs in sauce ravigote and in béarnaise, where it is steeped in a tarragon-vinegar reduction rather than a cold emulsion.