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Sauce

Hot Tartare Sauce

A hot sauce made from béchamel, egg yolks, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, gherkins, capers, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Hot Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the béchamel sauce until hot.

  2. Add the egg yolks and stir until cooked, but do not boil.

  3. Stir in the gherkins, capers, and parsley.

  4. Add enough lemon juice to make the sauce piquant.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 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
Thicken the warm sauce and add richness as they cook gently.
Béchamel sauce
Provides the creamy base that the other ingredients are stirred into.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and sharpens its flavour.
Capers
Contribute briny, sharp flavour that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolks and stir until cooked, but do not boil. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the sauce boils, the proteins scramble and the sauce can curdle and turn grainy.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, egg, lemon, pepper, parsley):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, egg, lemon, pepper, parsley. 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.

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