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Sauce

Tartare Sauce

A creamy sauce made with egg yolks, olive oil, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, pickles, onion, capers, garlic, parsley, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 624 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the emulsion

  1. In a bowl, combine egg yolks, salt, red pepper, mustard, and vinegar; mix well.

  2. Slowly add olive oil drop by drop while stirring, as you would for mayonnaise.

  3. Once combined, add lemon juice to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Finely chop the sour pickles, onion, capers, garlic, parsley, and cloves; mix into the sauce.

  2. Stir well and serve.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Lecithin in the yolks emulsifies the oil and vinegar into a thick, stable sauce.
Olive oil
Provides the fat that, dispersed into droplets, gives the sauce its rich, creamy body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the oil.
Lemon juice
Adds further acidity and fresh flavour, added to taste at the end.
Sour pickles
Add acidity, salty crunch and texture to the sauce.
Capers
Add briny, sharp flavour and a bit of texture.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil slowly. Oil added too fast cannot be absorbed by the egg yolk emulsifier, so the sauce breaks and separates instead of thickening.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Horseradishbetter flavor fit
  3. Lettucebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, egg, pepper, mustard, vinegar, lemon, capers. 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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