Tartar Sauce

Tartar sauce is really easy to make as long as you’ve got mayonnaise. I generally buy mayo because I’m a bit wary of using raw eggs and I can’t buy pasteurised ones locally.

Donna Hay’s recipe for tartar sauce

(Modern Classics Book 1 page 43)

[Take the basic mayonnaise and] stir through 1 tablespoon of rinsed and chopped salted capers, 2 tablespoons cornichons or gherkins, 1 tablespoon chopped dill, and 1 teaspoon lemon juice.

Not Delia’s recipe for not exactly tartar sauce

I’m fed up of the obligatory dill with nearly every fish recipe, plus I had run out of cornichons. So here’s my version, which tasted really good.

Take the basic mayonnaise and stir though some chopped capers, a sprinkling of dried tarragon and a squirt of lemon juice.

(You may see tartar sauce called tartare sauce sometimes. The reason is probably that the French call it sauce tartare and some English-speakers assume that the correct English spelling is simply to reverse the words. But it’s named after the Tartars, the tribes of Asiatic and East European Russia. So in English it’s definitely tartar and not tartare.)