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Tartars Sauce

A creamy sauce made with egg yolks, oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, pepper, salt, onion juice, capers, and cucumber pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Tartars Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the egg yolks and oil, whisking until smooth.

  2. Add vinegar, mustard, sugar, pepper, salt, and onion juice; mix well.

  3. Stir in the chopped capers and cucumber pickles last.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried or broiled meats and fish, or with meats served in jelly.

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. Capers + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,281 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil to form a thick, smooth sauce base.
Oil
Provides fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the sauce its rich body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the richness of the oil.
Capers
Add briny, sharp bursts of flavor that stand out against the creamy base.
Cucumber pickles
Add crunch and sweet-tart flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Whisking the yolks and oil until smooth. Egg yolks hold oil in tiny droplets only when they are whisked well and the oil is added gradually. Adding oil too fast or skipping the whisking can make the sauce split or stay greasy and thin.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, vinegar, mustard, sugar, pepper, capers, cucumber. 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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