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Sauce Tartare
Have on a plate three small, very sound and finely chopped pickles, one sound, finely hashed shallot, one-half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, one teaspoon capers, finely hashed, a quarter teaspoon chopped tarragon and a quarter teaspoon finely chopped chervil (cerfueil).
Place in a china bowl one raw egg yolk, one-half teaspoon ground English mustard, one-half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and one tablespoon good vinegar. Sharply mix with the wire whisk; then pour in, drop by drop, one gill good olive oil, continually mixing till all the oil is added. Add now all the ingredients, waiting for action, to the sauce, and briskly mix the whole together with the whisk for four minutes. Transfer into a cold saucebowl and serve. If any of the sauce is left over, place it in a china bowl and always keep it in a cool place for further use.
This is a hand-built mayonnaise with the tartare garnish folded in at the end. The only difficult part is the emulsion, and the original is right that it hinges on adding the oil slowly.
- The hinge: oil by dropsA single yolk will carry a gill of oil, but only if the first tablespoon or so goes in drop by drop with constant whisking. Once the mixture visibly thickens and pales you can move to a thin steady stream. If it breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and whisk the broken sauce into it as though it were the oil.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz, about 120 ml. That is a generous ratio to one yolk and gives a stiff sauce; hold back a tablespoon or two if you want it looser.
- A saltspoonRoughly an eighth to a quarter teaspoon. With cayenne, start at the low end and taste at the end.
- Ground English mustardDry mustard powder, not the prepared yellow paste in a jar. Besides heat it acts as an emulsifier, which is part of why the sauce holds.
- Temperature mattersBring the yolk, the vinegar and the oil to room temperature before starting. Cold oil emulsifies badly and is the usual cause of a split mayonnaise.
- Pickles and capers"Pickles" here means small sour cucumbers, cornichons or gherkins, not sweet pickle. Squeeze the chopped pickles and capers dry in a cloth or the brine will thin the finished sauce.
- Chervil and tarragonBoth are meant fresh; dried chervil has almost no flavour. If chervil is unavailable, use a little more parsley and a pinch of fresh tarragon rather than substituting dried.
- Raw yolk and storageThe sauce is never cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised. "A cool place" meant a larder or icebox; refrigerate it and use within three or four days.
- Yield and servingCloser to a cup once the chopped garnish is stirred in, enough for four to six as a sauce for fried or cold fish or cold meats. Serve it cold, as directed.
Sauce tartare is a French kitchen classic of the nineteenth century: a cold mayonnaise sharpened with mustard and vinegar and studded with pickles, capers and fine herbs. The name is usually explained by the period's loose use of "à la tartare" for anything served with a fierce, piquant seasoning, the same association that gave steak tartare its name; the connection to the Tatars themselves is decorative rather than documented. The recipe's shape here is pure restaurant practice of the era, and the little details give it away: the mise en place of chopped garnish laid out on a plate "waiting for action," the wire whisk, the china bowl rather than metal, the timed four minutes of mixing. That this appears in a book called The International Cook Book reflects how thoroughly professional French sauce work had become the common vocabulary of Anglo-American hotel and household cooking by the early twentieth century, well before bottled tartar sauce made it a supermarket item.