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Sauce Tartare

A creamy sauce made with raw egg yolk, mustard, oil, vinegar, capers, onion, gherkin, parsley, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sauce Tartare

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the yolk of the raw egg in a bowl.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt and dry mustard, and mix well.

  3. Slowly pour in the salad oil, alternating with the vinegar or lemon juice, while mixing.

  4. Add a pinch of cayenne pepper and mix until well combined.

  5. Stir in the capers, minced onion, chopped gherkin, and parsley.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Capers + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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.
Salad oil
Provides fat that, emulsified into the yolk, makes the sauce rich and smooth.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the oil.
Capers
Contribute briny, tangy flavour that sharpens the sauce.
Gherkin
Adds sour crunch and tangy flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Slowly pour in the salad oil, alternating with the vinegar or lemon juice, while mixing.. Adding oil too fast overwhelms the egg yolk, which cannot hold it in suspension, so the sauce splits into a greasy, loose mixture instead of a thick emulsion. Adding the oil slowly while whisking lets the yolk coat each droplet and stabilise it.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Horseradishbetter flavor fit
  3. Lettucebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, vinegar, pepper, capers, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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