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Tartare Sauce (Yolks of two uncooked eggs)
The yolks of two uncooked eggs, half cup of oil, one tablespoonful of vinegar, one of lemon juice, one of mustard, one teaspoonful of sugar, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper, one teaspoonful of salt, one of onion juice, one tablespoonful of chopped capers, one of chopped cucumber pickles. Make the same as mayonnaise dressing. Add the chopped ingredients the last thing. This sauce can be used with fried and broiled meats and fish, and with meats served in jelly.
A straightforward hand-made mayonnaise with the classic tartare garnish folded in at the end. The only real difficulty is the emulsion, and the original assumes you already know how to build one.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by drop"Make the same as mayonnaise dressing" means beat the yolks with the salt, mustard and acid first, then add the half cup of oil a few drops at a time until it thickens, only then in a thin stream. Adding oil faster than the yolks can absorb it is the one thing that breaks this sauce.
- Which mustard"One of mustard" is a tablespoon, and in a book of this date it most likely means dry English-style mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. A tablespoon of powder is assertive; start with two teaspoons and taste.
- The oilRecipes of this period usually meant olive oil. A neutral oil gives a cleaner result closer to modern tartare sauce; a strong extra-virgin olive oil will dominate the capers.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it straight into the bowl and discard the fibre. A teaspoon is what the recipe intends by "one of onion juice" — the measure carries over from the preceding teaspoon.
- Drain the chopped thingsCapers and cucumber pickle both carry brine. Chop them, blot them dry, and fold them in at the very end as instructed, or the liquid will thin the emulsion you just built.
- Raw yolksThis sauce is never cooked. Use pasteurised eggs, or the freshest eggs you can get, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised. Keep it refrigerated and use it within two or three days.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for four to six servings alongside fried fish or cold meat.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it a spoonful at a time. Nothing is lost.
Tartare sauce is a mayonnaise-family sauce — a first cousin of French sauce rémoulade — and its name is often said to come from the old European habit of attaching "à la tartare" to anything sharp, cold or aggressively seasoned, after the Tatars of the Eurasian steppe; the link to English steak tartare is disputed, and the name is as often derived from the sauce itself. What fixed the sauce in its modern form was the nineteenth-century mayonnaise itself, which spread from French professional kitchens into English and American domestic cookbooks. These sauces were filed by use rather than by kind: a cold, acid, caper-sharp dressing was the standard foil for fried and broiled meats, for fish, and for the meats in jelly the book mentions in the same breath — all things where richness needed cutting.