Tartares Beyond Beef
Chanterelle tartare. Photo credit: StockFood/Herbert Lehmann
Tartare is having a moment…again. Bon Appétit magazine called the dish, typically made using raw ingredients and set in a mold, its “Dish of the Year" last August. They highlighted not only the traditional beef tartare, but a lamb version, too. It continues to pop up nationwide in innovative incarnations, such as trout tartare, and vegetable tartares.
Although tartare might seem like a hallmark of nouvelle cuisine, it actually has a long history. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, steak tartare arrived stateside in the mid-1800s, thanks to a wave of German immigrants dubbed the “forty-eighters" (so called because they were fleeing the 1848 Germany uprisings).
It wasn’t until 1984 that the next tartare seems to have made its (heavily hyped) appearance. In Beverly Hills, California, “a table of six turned up their noses at the raw meat” delivered to their table at a French restaurant, reports The Atlantic. The chef scurried around his kitchen in search of something with a similar texture, spied tuna, tossed it with mayo, and served it to the (now very happy) diners. Thus, tuna tartare was born.
And as is true of rose-printed leggings and acid-washed denim, tartare once seemed so 80s, but has reared its head yet again, in more inventive twists on its predecessors, such as this pretty scallop tartare.
To figure out what exactly a tartare is, we called chef Ned Elliott, whose beet and beef tartare (three parts beet to one part sirloin) is quite popular at Foreign & Domestic, his Austin, Texas restaurant. Elliott is of the opinion that as long as a dish is set in a circular or square mold and is cut into uniform pieces, it can be a tartare. “I don’t always think of it as necessarily raw,” he told us, noting that in his tartare, a small portion of the beets are roasted.
Nor does a tartare need to be of meat, Elliott thinks, remembering a circular composition of 20 raw vegetables he tried once in Connecticut. He’s seen smoked trout tartare at Superba Snack Bar in Venice, pork and lamb tartares (pork heart tartare, such as this one in Houston, in particular is becoming more ubiquitous, he told us), and plans to experiment with basil-fed snail tartare at his restaurant. (And our editors have spied salmon tartare and beet tartare in New York City.)
Even foods you might think would be too difficult to eat raw aren’t immune to being tartare-d by an ambitious chef: “I’ve had real, just, raw octopus in Spain,” he laughed. “It was awesome. Somebody sat there and just beat the living hell out of the tentacles all day.” Minced, with a bit of olive oil, garlic and paprika, it was “not that chewy for octopus!”
And so tartare is the new raw is the new tartare. Everything old is new again.
