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Sauce

Sauce Remoulade

A French sauce made with onions, egg yolks, mustard, sugar, vinegar, pepper, salt, capers, and chives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sauce Remoulade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the grated onions, egg yolks, mustard, sugar, vinegar, white pepper, and coarse sea salt. Stir the mixture until well combined.

  2. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

  3. Add capers and chopped chives to the strained sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve with cold meats.

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.

  1. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the mustard and oil-free base to give the sauce a thick, creamy body.
Mustard
Adds sharp heat and helps bind the sauce while balancing the richness of the yolks.
Grated onions
Contribute pungent flavor and moisture, giving the sauce its savory bite.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and softens the sharp onion flavor.

The step that matters

Strain the sauce through a sieve. Straining removes the coarse onion pulp and any lumps from the egg yolks, so the sauce turns smooth and even in texture rather than gritty or chunky.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, egg, mustard, sugar, vinegar, capers, chive):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, egg, mustard, sugar, vinegar, capers, chive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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