Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce Tartare

A mayonnaise-based sauce with pickles, capers, parsley, and onion juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sauce Tartare

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the pickles, capers, parsley, and onion juice with the mayonnaise dressing just before using.

  2. You can substitute olives for pickles if you prefer a milder 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.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Mayonnaise dressing
Provides a creamy, rich base that carries the other flavours.
Pickles
Adds tangy acidity and crisp texture to the sauce.
Capers
Adds briny, sharp flavour that cuts through the richness.
Onion juice
Adds a sharp, aromatic onion flavour.

The step that matters

Mix just before using. Chopped pickles and onion juice are sharp and fresh-tasting. Adding them just before serving keeps their bite and crunch from softening or dulling in the creamy base.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, parsley. 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.

More tartar sauce recipes

Hot 3 See all 158 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes