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Morcan’s Tartan Sauce

A tartar sauce made with mustard, egg yolk, sweet oil, vinegar, pickles, capers, parsley, and shallot or leek.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Morcan’s Tartan Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. In a bowl, mix mustard, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Add the yolk of the raw egg and mix well.

  3. Slowly add sweet oil, stirring until thick.

  4. Thin the mixture with vinegar.

Add the chopped ingredients

  1. Chop the cucumber pickles, capers, parsley, and shallot or leek finely.

  2. Stir the chopped ingredients into the sauce about an hour before serving.

  3. If the sauce is too thick, add cold water to reach desired consistency.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Emulsifies the oil and vinegar, giving the sauce its thick, creamy body.
Sweet oil
Provides the fat that, emulsified with the yolk, makes the sauce rich and thick.
Mixed mustard
Helps hold the emulsion together and adds sharp flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and thins it slightly.
Cucumber pickles
Adds crunch and tangy, acidic flavour through the sauce.

The step that matters

Slowly add sweet oil, stirring until thick. Oil must be added slowly while stirring so the yolk can emulsify it. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion, leaving a greasy, runny sauce that will not thicken.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, pepper, egg, vinegar, capers, parsley, shallot):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, pepper, egg, vinegar, capers, parsley, shallot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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