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Sauce

Tartare Sauce

A creamy sauce made with egg yolk, mustard, salad oil, and tarragon vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 901 recipes mention both. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the emulsion

  1. Beat the egg yolk thoroughly.

  2. Mix the yolk with the mustard.

  3. Gradually add the salad oil while mixing well.

Finish

  1. Add tarragon vinegar until the sauce reaches the desired consistency.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + tarragontop 22% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together1,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Mustard + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together9,210 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Its lecithin binds oil and water so the oil stays suspended as a smooth sauce.
Salad oil
Supplies the fat that gives the sauce its richness and body.
Mustard
Helps stabilise the emulsion and adds a sharp, pungent flavour.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and a bright herbal sharpness that balances the rich oil.

The step that matters

Gradually add the salad oil while mixing well. Oil must be dispersed into the yolk in small amounts at first. Adding it too fast overwhelms the egg yolk's emulsifying ability, so the sauce breaks and separates instead of thickening.

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Shallotabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Cucumberabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, tarragon, vinegar. 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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