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Tartare Sauce
Make 1/2 pint of good mayonnaise with the yolk of a raw egg and the yolk of a hard-boiled one, adding a teaspoonful of French mustard, a teaspoonful of lemon juice and a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, after first blending 1/2 pint of olive oil with the two eggs. Add salt and pepper, a tablespoonful of chopped capers, the same of chopped chives, and half as much parsley and gherkins. These must all be minced and pounded as fine as possible. Stir well and press through a sieve. Serve with jellied fish, fried fish, or salads.
A classic French sauce tartare built on a mayonnaise that uses one raw and one cooked yolk — the hard-boiled yolk is what gives it body and insurance against splitting. A few of the measures need translating.
- What half a pint means hereIf the book is using the imperial pint, half a pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ cups; if American, 8 fl oz, or 1 cup. Either way the oil and the finished sauce are given the same volume, which cannot be right — that much oil plus two yolks and the flavourings makes appreciably more than half a pint of sauce. Treat the oil quantity as the real one and scale down if you want less.
- The hinge: the cooked yolk goes in firstMash the hard-boiled yolk smooth with the raw yolk and the mustard before a drop of oil goes near them. That paste is what carries the emulsion; add oil to a loose, lumpy base and it will break.
- Oil temperature and speedEverything at room temperature, and the first quarter of the oil added drop by drop. Once it has taken, the rest can go in a thin stream.
- French mustardDijon-style, most likely: in English-language cookery books of this period "French mustard" generally meant a smooth Dijon-type mustard rather than the sweetened dark condiment later sold under that name in Britain.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth using rather than substituting; if you have none, steep a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a day. Plain white vinegar makes the sauce sharp without the anise note that defines it.
- Pounding and sievingThe instruction to mince, pound and sieve produces a smooth, pale-green sauce in the formal French manner. Modern versions commonly leave the capers, gherkins, chives and parsley visible and coarsely chopped; sieve only if you want the older, refined texture.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs, or the freshest you can get, and keep it refrigerated and eat it within two or three days.
- YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 cups of finished sauce — enough for eight to ten servings alongside fried or cold fish.
Sauce tartare belongs to the family of cold mayonnaise-based sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where à la tartare generally signalled something served with a sharp, mustardy cold sauce; the association with the Tatars is traditional rather than documented, and the name most likely just carried the period's shorthand for anything bracingly piquant. The version here, with its hard-boiled yolk worked into the base and its four minced aromatics pounded and passed through a sieve, is the classical restaurant construction rather than the chunky tartar sauce that later became the standard partner to fried fish in Britain and America. A good tartare — served, as the note says, with jellied fish as readily as with fried — was one of the marks of a kitchen that had absorbed French method.