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Sauce Tartar

A creamy sauce made from egg yolks, mustard, butter, vinegar, gherkin, capers, cream, and parsley, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Tartar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, beat the yolks of two raw eggs with mustard and salt.

  2. Add two tablespoons of melted butter and beat well.

  3. Mix in two tablespoons of vinegar and beat again.

  4. Incorporate two more tablespoons of melted butter or oil.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Finish and serve

  1. Fold in the chopped gherkin, capers, cream, and parsley.

  2. Serve with any kind of fish.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and oil into a thick, smooth sauce.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a silky mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the fat.
Mustard
Helps hold the emulsion together and adds a sharp, pungent note.
Gherkin
Adds tangy, crunchy texture and acidity to the finished sauce.
Capers
Add briny, sharp flavour that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Beat in the butter or oil slowly while the yolks are whisked. Adding fat too quickly to egg yolks can break the emulsion, so the sauce separates and turns greasy instead of thick and smooth. Adding it gradually lets the yolk lecithin bind the fat into droplets.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Dillabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Nutmegabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, butter, vinegar, capers, cream. 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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