Remoulade Sauce
Hard boil three eggs for one hour; shell them and remove the yolks. As soon as cold, mash them to a paste, adding gradually the yolk of one raw egg. When perfectly smooth, add one-third of a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of cayenne, then work in slowly several tablespoonfuls of olive oil. By this time the mixture should be very thick. Proceed precisely as in making mayonnaise, using onehalf pint of olive oil and sufficient lemon juice or tarragon vinegar to slightly thin; the quantity of the latter will depend upon its acidity. When all the oil is used and the mixture is of the consistency of a stiff jelly, stir in one tablespoonful of green herbs, chervil tarragon, parsley, cress, chives a mixture of all or as many as can be procured, pounded to a smooth paste. Mix thoroughly and set in a cold place until needed.
A cold emulsion sauce built on a base of sieved cooked yolks, which makes it more forgiving than a straight mayonnaise. Two instructions need adjusting before you start.
- The one-hour boilTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer sets a yolk completely; an hour only drives it grey-green and sulfurous. Boil the eggs 12 minutes, cool them in cold water, and use the yolks.
- Half a pint of olive oilThat is one cup (240 ml); note that the recipe has already had you work in 'several tablespoonfuls' before this, so the total may run a little over a cup. Reckon on somewhere around 1 1/2 cups of finished sauce, enough to serve alongside cold game or a platter of cold meats.
- The raw yolkIt is never cooked here. Use a pasteurized egg if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the sauce refrigerated throughout.
- Building the emulsionThe cooked-yolk paste stabilizes things, but the first tablespoons of oil still go in drop by drop with constant beating. Once it thickens you can pour in a thin steady stream, thinning with lemon juice or tarragon vinegar whenever it stiffens past the point of accepting more oil.
- "Sufficient lemon juice"Genuinely open-ended in the original, and deliberately so, since vinegar strengths varied. Start with a teaspoon and add by the half-teaspoon; two to three tablespoons total is usual for a cup of oil.
- The herbsChervil, tarragon, parsley, cress and chives are the classic fines herbes group plus cress. Pounding to a paste in a mortar is worth the trouble because it releases colour and flavour that fine mincing does not; a small food processor with a little of the oil does the same job.
- "A cold place"Meant a larder or ice chest. Refrigerate, covered, and use within two days, since there is no cooking step to fall back on.
- What it is notThis is a herb rémoulade with no mustard, capers or anchovy. If you want the sharper restaurant version, those are added at the end, after the emulsion is complete.
Rémoulade is one of the classic French cold sauces, and its name is generally traced to a Picard dialect word for horseradish or black radish — a reminder that the original was a pungent condiment rather than a herb mayonnaise. By the late nineteenth century the professional French definition had settled on mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, capers, chopped herbs and often anchovy, while household books like this one printed simpler variants; the cooked-yolk base used here works because sieved hard-boiled yolks hold an emulsion together far more stubbornly than raw yolk alone and rescue a cook who pours the oil too fast. The practical point is that cold sauces of this kind were the standard accompaniment to cold roast birds, hare and venison on a supper or buffet table, where a hot gravy was no use. The Louisiana rémoulade familiar from shrimp platters is a later divergence, tomato-tinted and paprika-heavy, and shares little beyond the name.