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Sauce

Tartare Sauce

A creamy sauce made from mushrooms, onion, butter, wheatmeal, and lemon, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the mushrooms and onion in ½ pint of water for 15 minutes.

  2. Add the butter, pepper, and salt, then strain the sauce.

  3. Return the sauce to the saucepan and thicken it with the wheatmeal.

  4. Add the lemon juice and let it simmer for 2-3 minutes before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Give the sauce its body and savoury, earthy flavour as they soften in the water.
Allinson fine wheatmeal
Thickens the strained liquid as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the wheatmeal. Starch needs to be fully heated in liquid to swell and thicken; if the sauce is not kept hot while the wheatmeal is stirred in, it can stay thin or turn lumpy.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, pepper, lemon):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, lemon. 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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