Skip to main content
Salad

Sauce Tartare

A mayonnaise-based sauce with pickles, capers, olives, parsley, onion juice, mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and mustard 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. In a bowl, combine the mayonnaise dressing with chopped pickles, capers, olives, parsley, and onion juice.

  2. Season the mixture with mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Mix well and serve with fried or broiled fish or fish balls.

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 + mustardtop 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 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
Forms the creamy base that carries all the other flavors.
Pickles
Adds acidity and a tangy crunch that cut through the richness.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny bite that brightens the sauce.
Olives
Contribute salty, briny flavor and a firm texture.
Onion juice
Adds savory sharpness without the texture of chopped onion.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, olive, parsley, mustard, pepper. 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

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes