Name: Tartare Sauce
Ingredients: 1 cup mayonnaise; 4 olives, chopped fine; 2 gherkins, chopped fine; 2 teaspoons capers, chopped fine

Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

1 cup mayonnaise
4 olives, chopped fine
2 gherkins, chopped fine
2 teaspoons capers, chopped fine

Directions

In a bowl, combine the mayonnaise, chopped olives, gherkins, and capers. Mix well until all ingredients are evenly distributed.

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.

Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 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

Mayonnaise: Provides the creamy base and fat that carries the chopped pickled ingredients.
Olives: Add briny, salty bite that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Gherkins: Add crunch and a sharp, acidic tang.
Capers: Contribute a salty, tangy punch and a distinct pickled flavour.

“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.