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Sauce

Tartare Sauce for Fish

A cold sauce made with egg yolks, olive oil, vinegar, onion, capers, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,688 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tartare Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the hard-boiled egg yolks.

  2. Add the raw egg yolks and beat until smooth and light.

  3. Gradually beat in the olive oil and vinegar alternately.

  4. Stir in the chopped onion and capers.

  5. Season with salt and cayenne pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve cold in a sauceboat.

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. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together68,474 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

Raw egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and vinegar, giving the sauce a thick, smooth body.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add body and a rich, mellow texture to the sauce.
Olive oil
Provides fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the sauce its creamy richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Gradually beat in the olive oil and vinegar alternately. Adding oil slowly while beating lets the egg yolk lecithin break the oil into tiny droplets. Adding it too fast can cause the sauce to separate and fail to thicken.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, olive, vinegar, capers, pepper):

  1. Mustardbetter flavor fit
  2. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, olive, vinegar, capers, pepper. 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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