We did an event last night with Found Oyster and yes, I told the same old story I always do about one of my favorite times in life when I would do my Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve at the Prudential Center mall and finish it all off with a nice meal at none other than Legal Sea Foods. A shrimp cocktail to start, Harpoon IPAs aplenty of course and then fish and chips, extra lemon wedges, lots of extra tartar sauce.

My first brush with tartar was as a pimply faced teenager, probably high as a kite, and adding it to freshly nuked fish sticks from the old deep freeze.

Me and the Found boys and El Presidente all agreed that whatever seafood you’re eating is usually not enough, especially at an event such as a crab bake or whatever, and you will need plenty of fried items and sauces to soak up all the beer. Which then brought up the question in my mind. At what point did sauce gribiche become tartar?

Maybe tartar was first, someone offered. Interesting take but no. But wait a minute….

And so began this morning’s investigation.

First, if you have been living under a rock, sauce gribiche is aioli with chopped cornichon, capers, red wine vinegar, some hard boiled egg, and classically some parsley and if you want to go whole hog and impress no one–chervil and tarragon. Tasty but everyone knows you’re showing off for no reason. The base of it, like any good dipping agent is aioli itself, A.K.A. the white man’s kryptonite, a classic French emulsion in the egg category of mother sauces which now goes under the moniker of mayonnaise here in the States. Yeah, yeah, I know they’re a little different. Still mayo, dude, get out of here. Two fat molecules bound by a protein molecule if you want to go full fancy pants which is also the sccientific base for hollandaise, bearnaise, yada, yada. Pretty tasty stuff and whenever a chef makes it I call it the poor man’s tartar as a joke because I’m an asshole. Or I’ll say, just make tartar and call it a day. This nine times out of ten gets me a scowl and I shrink away back to the dark, comforting confines of the bar. But secretly I am not kidding and I think every chef who makes gribiche is just wasting their time because all you really need is tartar and gribiche, lets’ face it, doesn’t take any special talent.

As a snide aside, I love how many websites there are featuring recipes for tartar sauce. I’m sorry but if you can’t chop up some pickles and stir them into mayonnaise then you have no hope.

Hey, we’ve all been amateur egg sauce chefs at some point. Coming home late at night after a night of binge drinking or smoking too much weed and digging deep into a poorly stocked fridge rife with the classic “big three” condiments or even during a Sunday morning and thinking we’re a genius by mixing some mayo with sriracha for a nice dip with hash browns or tater tots. Shit, we all had a light bulb moment at some point in our youth when we figured out how to make McDonalds’ special sauce by combining ketchup and mayo. If I had to guess, this is how tartar sauce was invented. Someone just got lazy and didn’t want to add ketchup to their thousand island. I’d bet on that. My best guess would be that tartar came about somewhat recently in New England where it goes best with copious amounts of fried plunder from the sea.

But oh no, my friends, after two minutes of research it is determined that tartar sauce does indeed predate gribiche. In the dead pan words of Arnold with a bad Russian accent in Red Heat, “No, I am not shitting on you.”

Tartar sauce was originally tartare sauce, like for steak tartare and yes, predates gribiche. Makes sense right? Two of the ingredients for steak tartare are aioli and chopped cornichon. Both sauces originated in 19th century France but steak tartare did get its name from the nomadic Tartar tribes of Central Asia who were said to consume raw meat.

So it seems some French chef somewhere along the way puffed a doob and took some tartar and fancied it up way too much one night. Say this with your best French accent in your head–“First we take some vinegar, then some mustard, cornichon, capers, hard boiled egg, parsley, then we mix together, oui?” But we all know you don’t need all that other crap in there. Well, maybe a healthy portion of sriracha to make what I call Million Island.

Your AI generated image for this post, #419.