Name: Tartare Sauce
Ingredients: mayonnaise sauce; 1 tablespoon chopped capers; 1 chopped gherkin

Why it works: Sauce and capers work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and 678 recipes mention both. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

mayonnaise sauce
1 tablespoon chopped capers
1 chopped gherkin

Directions

Prepare mayonnaise sauce.
Add chopped capers and chopped gherkin to the mayonnaise sauce.

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.

Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together678 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise sauce: Provides the creamy, rich base that carries the sauce's texture and fat.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Gherkin: Adds crunch and a tangy, sour sweetness to the sauce.

“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.