Name: Remoulade Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint mayonnaise sauce; 2 teaspoons French mustard; 2 teaspoons chopped capers

Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Remoulade Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint mayonnaise sauce
2 teaspoons French mustard
2 teaspoons chopped capers

Directions

Make ½ pint of mayonnaise sauce.
Add 2 teaspoons of French mustard and 2 teaspoons of chopped capers to the mayonnaise and mix well to combine.

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.

Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together624 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + mustardtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,120 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 of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
French mustard: Adds sharp, tangy flavour that cuts the richness of the mayonnaise.
Capers: Add briny, sharp notes that give the sauce its characteristic remoulade flavour.