Name: Tartare Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pint mayonnaise sauce; 1 tablespoon chopped gherkin or capers; 1 teaspoon finely chopped shallot (optional)

Why it works: Capers and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 405 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

1 pint mayonnaise sauce
1 tablespoon chopped gherkin or capers
1 teaspoon finely chopped shallot (optional)

Directions

Stir the gherkin and shallot into the mayonnaise until well combined.
Use as required.

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.

Capers + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together678 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + shallottop 14% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,303 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: Forms the creamy base that carries the other flavours and gives the sauce its richness.
Gherkin or capers: Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Shallot: Adds a mild, sharp onion aroma that rounds out 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.