Fish Finger and Tartare Sauce

The tub of tartare comes out of the fridge alongside the box of fish fingers, and reaching for it instead of the ketchup bottle settles what kind of sandwich this becomes. Tartare is no smooth condiment. It is a bound, emulsified mayonnaise carrying chopped capers, chopped gherkins, a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar and often parsley, and that loaded make-up is its entire job. The crumbed fish holds steady, a baton of mild white meat in a brittle orange shell, while the sauce meets it with a built-in sourness and a scatter of small briny pieces that break up an otherwise rich and even bite. This is the version a cook makes when they want the sauce to answer back.

The craft is the sauce keeping its shape against hot fish. Because it is emulsified, tartare sits as a thick clinging band rather than a slick that runs, and that body is the point: it goes onto the fingers as a deliberate ridge, not smeared thin where it would soak the bread and lose its bite. The capers and chopped gherkin keep their own firmness even against warm fish, so the contrast of soft flake and sharp pickle outlives the first bite, and the lemon or vinegar in the base lifts the fish without thinning the sauce to a drip. The fingers go down hot off the fryer, crumb still crackling, since that shell is the only crunch the sandwich owns and a wet sauce softens it fastest. Soft white bread, buttered to the edge, keeps the base from drinking fish oil and the sauce's faint moisture before it reaches the mouth.

Push any part and it breaks in a particular way. Fingers fried pale go soft and steamy once the lid of bread traps their heat, and the single crunch is lost; fried too hard, they fracture as the slice presses down and shed loose crumb into the sauce. Tartare smeared thin and wide loses the job entirely, the chopped pieces stranded and the acid faint while the bread underneath turns wet; piled on heavy it slides and floods and the briny bits drown one another. An overdose of lemon turns the whole bite sour rather than lifted. Bread left dry under the band soaks up the oil and goes papery; toasted hard it cracks the soft fingers as the lid comes down.

Press the top slice and a little sauce wells at the cut edge, pale and flecked green and yellow against the orange crumb. The shell crackles first, then the cool sharp lumpy sauce hits and the capers burst small and salt-sour between the teeth, then the hot mild flake comes up underneath, ready to scald a careless palate. The gherkin gives a vegetal snap the soft fish never could. Lemon prickles at the back of it and keeps the mayonnaise from reading as plain fat. A stray caper rolls toward the corner and a fingertip nudges it back, butter greasing the path. It is a warm, soft, brittle bite with a cold sharp argument running clean through the centre.

Choosing tartare carries a grown-up register the sweeter sauces give up, and it is a small declaration at the counter or the kitchen table. This is the chip-shop sauce, the tub that comes with battered cod and scampi, the one a fish supper expects, and spooning it onto the fingers pulls a nursery sandwich toward the fryer and the seaside rather than the after-school plate. Where a child grabs the red bottle, the tartare version is the one an adult builds for themselves, the same fingers dressed in the sauce fish has always been served with rather than the one ketchup made ordinary.

Look down the row and every neighbour is the same fish under a different condiment decision. Sweet tomato is the ketchup reading, plain where this one is sharp. A darker, spiced one is the brown-sauce reading. A soft layer of marrowfat peas underneath is the mushy-pea build. Melted cheese under the grill forces a hot assembly. The fish finger sandwich with no sauce committed yet is the baseline the rest grow out from, and a battered chip-shop fillet folded in bread is the heavier, wetter cousin. Each keeps a separate entry rather than ranking as a variant of this one; what is particular here is a condiment chosen because it cuts.

The oddity sits in the dates. More than a hundred years stand between the two halves of this sandwich, and the older of them is the sauce, not the fish. That gap is what the history below accounts for, reaching from a French standard repertoire back through a Georgian English cookbook.

The fish finger is by far the younger half, a breaded white-fish baton sold frozen in Britain only from the mid-1950s. The sauce on it descends from formal French cookery and predates the fish by well over a century, growing out of eighteenth-century dishes served à la tartare, breaded meats and fish dressed with a sharp cold sauce. An English instance turns up as early as John Nott's Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary of 1723, with cold-sauced pigeons cut about with onion, anchovy and pickle.

The sauce that came with the fish

The mayonnaise-based sauce the name now means was settled across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by named cooks. Alexis Soyer gave a sauce à la tartare with cornichons, capers and shallot in 1849. Jules Gouffé placed it in the mayonnaise family in his Livre de cuisine of 1867. Auguste Escoffier fixed it in Le Guide Culinaire of 1903 as a standard accompaniment for fried fish, which is exactly the role it plays here. The earliest English use of the word tartar for the sauce is recorded around 1824.

So the two halves carry two histories, and the joining of them belongs to no one. No cook can be named for first banding tartare along a fish finger, and the moment went unrecorded; it is simply what happened once a postwar freezer product met a condiment that classic cookery had long since married to fried fish.

The fish finger reached the British freezer only in the mid-1950s. The sauce a cook now spoons onto it had by then been a fixed part of the fried-fish table for half a century, set down in print by Auguste Escoffier in his Guide Culinaire of 1903.