🇩🇪 Germany · Family: Das belegte Brötchen
Remoulade is not a sandwich, and this entry will not pretend it is one. It is the cold mayonnaise-based sauce that the northern German fish counter is built around, the standing partner to fried fish and the component without which a Backfischbrötchen is just hot fish in bread. It is listed here because it is structural rather than incidental: across the whole Fischbrötchen tradition the same sauce keeps turning up doing the same job, and a roll is only as good as the Remoulade on it. Treating it as a component, not a dish, is the honest way to write about it, because nobody eats it alone and everything it touches depends on it.
The make is specific and not interchangeable with a generic tartare. The base is a mayonnaise, and into it goes finely chopped Gewürzgurken or Cornichons, capers, mustard, and a real fistful of herbs, often parsley and dill, sometimes chopped egg, a little onion, a squeeze of lemon. The structural job is acid and texture against fat. Fried fish is hot, rich, and one-note; the Remoulade is cold, sharp, and full of small crunchy bits, and the contrast is the entire reason the pairing reads as complete. A good Remoulade is properly cold, properly sharp, thick enough to hold on the cut face of a roll rather than running off, and chunky enough that you taste the pickle and caper as distinct hits. A sloppy one is thin, under-seasoned, and timid, a faint creamy nothing that leaves the fat with nothing to push against, which is the most common way a fish roll fails even when the fish itself is good.
Uses vary, and that is the case for its place here rather than against it. It anchors the Backfisch and Fischfilet rolls, sharpens a Krabbenbrötchen, rounds the acid on a herring roll for people who find the straight fillet too sharp, and turns up beside fries and Schnitzel far from any fish at all. Each of those rolls is a real sandwich with its own structure, its own bread, and its own balance, and each one runs on its own logic and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.
More from this family
Other Das belegte Brötchen sandwiches in Germany: