Sauce Tartare
To one cup of mayonnaise dressing, seasoned with mixed seasoning, add a small half teaspoonful tabasco sauce and a tablespoonful each of pickled onions, capers, water-cress and parsley, minced fine, before measuring, also a teaspoonful of tarragon vinegar. Mix all well totogether and serve.
A cold sauce built on a cup of mayonnaise, with the herbs and pickles measured after mincing. The only real technique here is restraint with the liquids.
- "Mixed seasoning"A house blend the book assumes you keep on hand; such blends were typically salt and pepper based, sometimes with mustard or a little sugar, though this page does not say. Salt and white pepper with a pinch of mustard powder gets you there; season the mayonnaise before the additions, not after.
- Mince first, then measureThe instruction to mince "before measuring" is deliberate: a tablespoon of finely minced parsley is several times as much leaf as a tablespoon of sprigs, so the sauce is meant to be well flecked with herb.
- Keep the liquid in checkTarragon vinegar and tabasco both thin mayonnaise, and capers and pickled onions carry brine. Drain and blot the pickled things, add the vinegar last, and stop if the sauce starts to slacken.
- WatercressUse leaves only, stems pulled off; the stalks are fibrous and will not disappear into the sauce. Watercress bruises fast once cut, so it goes in at the end.
- Pickled onionsSmall whole cocktail onions in vinegar, not pickled shallots in oil and not raw onion. Cornichons or chopped gherkin are the usual modern substitute and are closer in effect than raw onion would be.
- TabascoA scant half teaspoon in one cup is assertive. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseMayonnaise dressing of this period is built on raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- Yield and restingAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for six to eight servings alongside fried fish or cold game. Best used the day it is made, before the cress darkens.
Sauce tartare reaches English-language cookbooks through French practice, where it was a mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, capers, pickles and fines herbes and served with cold meats and fried food; the name is generally traced to nineteenth-century French kitchen usage rather than to anything Tatar, and the connection is decorative at best. Its association with game is the interesting part: a cold, acid, heavily pickled sauce was the standard partner to strong or dry meat, and a tart mayonnaise did for cold roast wildfowl what a mustard or currant sauce did for it hot. The tabasco is the American signature — Louisiana pepper sauce turns up in turn-of-the-century American cookery in places a French author would have reached for cayenne.