Tartar sauce developed from eighteenth century dishes served à la tartare, breaded meats and fish paired with pungent cold dressings. Nineteenth century cookbooks contained yolk-free and mayonnaise-based versions, and writers such as Alexis Soyer and Jules Gouffé positioned the sauce within the mayonnaise family. By the early twentieth century Auguste Escoffier presented tartar sauce with fried fish and tied it to steak tartare, while English usage of the term dates to the 1820s.
Recipe
Nineteenth-century French cookbooks describe sauce tartare as a mayonnaise to which pungent condiments and finely chopped aromatics are added. La grande cuisine illustree (late 19th to early 20th century) defines it as mayonnaise "augmented with capers, cornichons, tarragon and chervil, and strongly seasoned with mustard, English sauce (Worcestershire) and cayenne."[3] In Le Guide Culinaire (1903), Auguste Escoffier's Sauce Tartare is built by working hard-boiled egg yolks into a paste, mounting with oil and vinegar, and finishing with a puree of green onion or chives and a little mayonnaise. Escoffier intended the sauce for cold fish, shellfish, meats and poultry.[4]
Hungary, a distinct variant (tartarmartás) often combines mayonnaise with sour cream and seasons with sugar, white pepper, mustard and lemon juice, alongside pickles/onion and herbs.[5]
Japan, a yoshoku style of tartar sauce (frequently chunkier and including chopped hard-boiled egg and onion) is a standard accompaniment to dishes like chicken nanban and ebi furai.[6]
Central and Eastern Europe, sos tatarski is commonly served with cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, herring, and cold fish platters. Many Polish recipes include chopped pickled mushrooms in addition to gherkins and herbs.[7][8]
History
18th century early dishes "à la tartare"
Recipe for pike à la tartare in Wojciech Wielądko's book Kucharz doskonały, 1783
Eighteenth-century cookbooks in French, English, and Polish use à la tartare for dishes of meat or fish that were breaded (or crumbed) and grilled or roasted, typically served with a sharp, cold sauce.[9][10][11] The accompanying "tartar" sauce in these early sources was an oil and acid emulsion or dressing sharpened with mustard and chopped aromatics, such as shallot or onion, anchovy, pickles and parsley, rather than a true mayonnaise. An English example is Nott's "Pigeons a la Tartare with cold Sauce" (1723), mixed from chopped onion or shallot, anchovy and pickles with oil, water, lemon juice and mustard.[12]
The earliest English attestations of the term "sauce tartare" date from the 1820s.[13]
"Tartar sauce" without yolks or mayonnaise
Nineteenth-century books record tartar sauce recipes assembled without egg yolk or mayonnaise. Manuel de gastronomie (1825) gives a version thickened with breadcrumbs.[14]Antoine Beauvilliers's L'art du cuisinier (1814 edition) lists a tartar sauce without crumbs but likewise not mayonnaise based.[15] Louis-Eustache Audot reproduced the recipe in La cuisiniere de la campagne et de la ville (1853) and in a Spanish translation (1854), suggesting broad circulation across Europe.[16][17] An anonymous Polish manual, Nowa kuchnia warszawska (1838), likewise gives a cold tartar sauce of chopped shallots or onion and tarragon seasoned with mustard, salt, pepper, vinegar and oil, with no yolks.[18] The chef C. P. Robert even contrasted a hot tartar sauce without yolk to a cold yolk-based sauce he labeled rémoulade.[19]
Emergence of mayonnaise-based tartar sauce
By the early to mid-19th century, authors also described tartar sauce built from hard-boiled or raw yolks and oil. An Austrian manual (1824) printed "Senf-Tunke oder Remulade (Sauce Tartare)" with herbs and yolk.[20]Alexis Soyer's The Gastronomic Regeneration (1849) gives Sauce a la Tartare using both cooked and raw yolks with cornichons, capers, parsley and shallot, plus French mustard and cayenne.[21] Polish sources adopted yolk-based versions as well. For example, Jozef Schmidt's Kuchnia polska (1860) sieved hard-boiled yolks with mustard and oil, adjusted with vinegar and optionally colored green with spinach or garden cress juice.[22]
In late-19th-century French practice, tartar sauce was firmly classed among the mayonnaise family. Jules Gouffe's Le livre de cuisine (1867 and later editions of 1877) listed sauce tartare alongside related cold sauces,[23][24] and encyclopedic manuals of the era reinforced the mayonnaise base with chopped cornichons or capers and herbs.[3]
"À la tartare" and steak tartare
In classical usage, a la tartare meant "served with tartar sauce." Auguste Escoffier's Beefsteak a la Tartare (1903) was defined as the raw chopped beef preparation "a l'Americaine without the egg yolk on top," with sauce tartare served separately.[25] Escoffier also listed the sauce as a standard accompaniment for fried fish, for example Cabillaud frit.[26] Over the 20th century, the raw-beef dish now generally called steak tartare evolved independently, while sauce tartare persisted as a widely used cold mayonnaise sauce.[27]
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