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Tartare Sauce

A creamy sauce made with egg yolks, olive oil, mustard, vinegar, and chopped pickles, onions, 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. Combine the egg yolks, salt, red pepper, mustard, and vinegar in a bowl and mix well.

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

  3. Add the juice of half a lemon to flavor the mixture.

Add the chopped ingredients

  1. Finely chop the sour pickles, onion, capers, garlic, parsley, and cloves.

  2. Add the chopped ingredients to the sauce and stir well 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. 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
Emulsify the oil and vinegar so the sauce holds together thick and smooth.
Olive oil
Provides the rich fat that gives the sauce its body and mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the oil and yolks.
Mustard
Helps stabilize the emulsion and adds a sharp, tangy bite.
Sour pickles
Contribute acidity and crunch that give the sauce its characteristic tang.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil. Oil must be added drop by drop while whisking so the yolks can disperse it into tiny droplets. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion, leaving a greasy, separated sauce.

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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