Sauce Tartare
1 1/4 cups Mazola Mayonnaise 1 tablespoon thinly sliced sweet pickles 1 teaspoon chopped chives 1/2 teaspoon minced parsley 1 tablespoon chow-chow 1 tablespoon capers 1 tablespoon pimientos Combine and use with fish, cold sliced tongue, sliced jellied beef or as a dressing for cole-slaw.
The page as printed begins mid-list, so the base and the quantity for the pickles have been lost. What survives is the flavouring set for a standard tartare sauce, and it works if you supply the missing foundation.
- The missing baseA sauce tartare of this period is roughly a cup of thick mayonnaise, or mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice. The list here is the garnish only; folded into a cup of mayonnaise the quantities come out balanced.
- The truncated first line"sweet pickles" arrives with no measure. Judging by the tablespoon-scale of everything else, a tablespoon or two of finely chopped sweet pickle is in keeping. Treat this as a reconstruction, not a reading of the original.
- Chow-chowA mustard-spiked mixed vegetable pickle, usually cauliflower, onion, cucumber and green tomato, sold widely in jars in the early twentieth century and still available in the South and in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Sweet pickle relish plus a pinch of dry mustard covers it if you cannot find any.
- PimientosCanned sweet red peppers, skinned and packed in brine, not a hot chile. Drain and chop them fine or the sauce weeps red liquid.
- Drain everythingCapers, chow-chow, pickle and pimiento all carry brine. Blot the chopped solids on a towel before folding them in, or the mayonnaise will thin and separate on standing.
- Rest before servingMix at least half an hour ahead and keep cold. The chives and parsley need time to bleed into the base; served immediately the sauce tastes of nothing but pickle.
- YieldWith a cup of mayonnaise as the base, about a cup and a quarter of sauce, enough for six servings of fried fish. Keep refrigerated and use within three days.
- If you make the mayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked egg yolk that is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised; otherwise a good bottled mayonnaise is a fair substitute for the original.
Sauce tartare is a French kitchen sauce, generally traced to the nineteenth century and named by way of "à la tartare", a label often said to attach to sharp, mustard-and-pickle-heavy preparations rather than to anything actually Tatar, though the derivation is traditional and not documented. American cookbooks took it up enthusiastically once commercial mayonnaise and jarred pickles made it a matter of assembly rather than technique, and by the 1910s and 1920s it appears in domestic manuals as the default accompaniment to fried fish. The suggestions here — cold sliced tongue, jellied beef, cole-slaw — show the range it was expected to cover: one bowl of sharp dressing to carry a spread of cold meats.