Name: Tartare Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint thick mayonnaise sauce; 2 teaspoons capers; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; a dash of cayenne or Nepaul pepper (optional)

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,550 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint thick mayonnaise sauce
2 teaspoons capers
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
a dash of cayenne or Nepaul pepper (optional)

Directions

Make the sauce

Make the mayonnaise sauce according to your preferred recipe.
Add the minced capers and chopped parsley to the mayonnaise.
If desired, add a dash of cayenne or Nepaul pepper.

Serve

Serve with salmon cutlets or cold salmon.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together678 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together2,088 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together6,693 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 body.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Parsley: Adds fresh, green aroma and a mild herbal flavour.

Flavor stand-ins for the capers

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

Tarragonabout as good a flavor fit
Marjoramabout as good a flavor fit
Thymeabout as good a flavor fit
Capersthe original

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