Sauce Piquante
Take an onion, chop very fine; one pod of redpepper or a dash of tabasco sauce and one small clove of garlic, chopped so fine that you cannot detect it in eating it, for many persons object to it; but there is no flavoring so pleasant. Add a few sprays of parsley and thyme to this; add three tablespoonfuls of sweet oil, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one teaspoonful of salt; mix all these ingredients thoroughly and serve with cold fish.
An uncooked sauce closer to a sharp vinaigrette than to the cooked, roux-based sauce piquante of Louisiana kitchens. It comes together in minutes, and the only real work is the knife work.
- Mince, don't chopThe instruction to cut the garlic "so fine that you cannot detect it" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Reduce the garlic to a paste with the flat of the knife and a pinch of the salt, and mince the onion to near-pulp; anything coarser gives raw crunch and a hot garlic bite instead of the intended background flavor.
- Sweet oilNineteenth-century shorthand for olive oil, usually a mild grade rather than a peppery modern extra-virgin. A light or medium olive oil suits the balance here better than a strongly grassy one.
- One pod of red pepperA whole dried cayenne or similar small hot pod, seeds and stem discarded, crushed or minced fine. Given the wide range of heat in modern dried chiles, start with a scant half and taste; the recipe specifies only 'a dash' of tabasco, so start with an eighth of a teaspoon or so and adjust.
- ProportionsThree parts oil to two parts vinegar is much sharper than a modern 3:1 vinaigrette. That acidity is deliberate for cold fish, but if it reads harsh with your vinegar, hold back some of it rather than adding oil.
- VinegarPlain cider or white wine vinegar is right for the period. A teaspoon of salt to five tablespoons of liquid is a lot; add half, mix, and correct at the end.
- Rest before servingGive the mixed sauce fifteen to twenty minutes at room temperature so the onion and garlic soften into the acid, then stir again before spooning it over. It separates on standing, as any unemulsified dressing does.
- YieldRoughly a third of a cup of dressing before the onion and herbs are counted in, so a little more in the bowl; enough to dress cold fish for several servings. It keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator, though the garlic grows more assertive.
"Piquante" simply means sharp or pungent, and in nineteenth-century American cookbooks the label was often applied loosely to preparations built on vinegar and a bite of pepper. This version has nothing to do with the long-simmered tomato-and-roux sauce piquante of Cajun cooking; it belongs instead to the older family of cold vinegar sauces served with fish, kin to ravigote and to the many "cold sauces" that pantry cookery relied on. The apologetic note about garlic is worth reading twice: the recipe itself records that "many persons object to it," a sign that the bulb was still to be used invisibly if used at all.