Name: Sauce Tartare
Ingredients: ½ teaspoon mustard; 3 teaspoons mustard; 1 pickle, chopped; 2 teaspoons capers, dried; 1 green onion, chopped; a few sprigs of chervil, chopped; a few tarragon leaves, chopped

Why it works: Chervil and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce Tartare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce as directed for the previous recipe.
Add 3 teaspoons of mustard instead of ½ teaspoon.
Chop a pickle and dry it with a napkin.
Chop the capers, green onion, chervil, and tarragon leaves.
Mix all the ingredients into your sauce.

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.

Chervil + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together824 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Capers + cherviltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together135 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together624 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together379 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together901 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, capers, chervil, tarragon):

Shallotfits better
Lettucefits better
Chivefits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, capers, chervil, tarragon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.