h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This works great with white fish, though somehow it's a bit too 'fishy' for fresh salmon. My mom uses an altered Joy of Cooking recipie: a cup of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of grainy French mustard, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of shallots, a tablespoon of sweet pickle, and a tablespoon of capers. Julia Child uses a hard-cooked egg, finely chopped, but we don't bother and it works fine. If you do put the egg in, you have to use the sauce up quickly.

A good sauce for salmon can be made with mayonnaise and ketchup, mixed to taste. It should be sort of salmon pink when you've got it right.

A far less elegant, but much quicker and simpler, recipe for tartare sauce is to combine equal parts pickle relish and mayonnaise. (Some hamburger joints make their tartare sauce this way.) It's actually quite good and does taste like tartare sauce. Also, substituting Miracle Whip for mayo gives an even better result. (This is probably the only instance where it is actually preferrable to use Miracle Whip.)

Good stuff and I'm all for short cuts. Recipes so far are a bit sweet for my taste though - reflecting American palates? I'd regard a few chopped gherkins as indispensable to any tartare. FYI, Katharine Whitehorn quoted in her book 'Cooking in a bedsitter':

I know what they put in the sauce tartare
the sauce tartare in the restaurant car.

Sung, apparently, by a waiter in some forgotten musical who could not as a result of this piece of knowledge be sacked!

Yup, the recipie I sent in was American, though Julia Child has French training. I guess you could put the gherkins in instead of the relish.

Great quote! That must have been an odd musical...