Name: Tartar Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup mayonnaise dressing; 1 teaspoon onion juice; 2 teaspoons chopped capers; 1 teaspoon chopped pickle

Why it works: Onion and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,381 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartar Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup mayonnaise dressing
1 teaspoon onion juice
2 teaspoons chopped capers
1 teaspoon chopped pickle

Directions

In a bowl, combine mayonnaise dressing, onion juice, chopped capers, and chopped pickle, then mix well until all ingredients are thoroughly combined.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,381 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise dressing: Provides the creamy base and fat that carries the sauce's flavour and texture.
Capers: Add a briny, sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the dressing.
Pickle: Adds tangy acidity and a crisp, sour note that brightens the sauce.
Onion juice: Contributes sharp, aromatic onion flavour without the texture of chopped onion.

“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.