Name: Sauce Tartare
Ingredients: 1 cup mayonnaise; 1 tablespoon chopped parsley; 1 tablespoon chopped sour gherkins; 2 tablespoons finely chopped olives; 1 tablespoon chopped capers

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sauce Tartare

Ingredients

1 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 tablespoon chopped sour gherkins
2 tablespoons finely chopped olives
1 tablespoon chopped capers

Directions

Mix all the ingredients together.
Serve as cold as possible with jellied chicken, cold boiled salmon, fried oysters, or lobster cutlets.

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.

Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise: Forms the creamy base and carries the flavour of the other ingredients.
Sour gherkins: Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.
Capers: Contribute a tangy, briny bite that brightens the sauce.
Olives: Add salty, savoury depth to the sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

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

Parsleythe original
Tarragonabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, capers. 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.