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Sauce

Tartare Sauce

A creamy sauce made with egg yolks, oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, pepper, and gherkins or capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 624 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small bowl, lightly beat the egg yolks and vinegar together.

  2. Slowly add the salad oil or melted butter drop by drop while stirring continuously.

  3. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and mustard.

  4. Fold in the finely chopped gherkins (or capers).

Serve

  1. Serve in a gravy boat with boiled salmon or 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together15,430 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,088 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil into the vinegar, giving the sauce its thick, creamy body.
Salad oil
Provides the fat that, added slowly, forms the body and richness of the sauce.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps balance the richness of the oil.
Gherkins
Add a sharp, tangy crunch that contrasts with the creamy base.

The step that matters

Adding the oil drop by drop while stirring. Egg yolk lecithin holds oil droplets in suspension only if the oil goes in slowly and is stirred constantly. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion, so the sauce separates and turns thin and oily.

Flavor stand-ins for the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, pepper, cider, vinegar, mustard):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Dillabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Capersthe original
  4. Allspiceabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, pepper, cider, vinegar, mustard. 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.

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