Homemade Tartar Sauce

Before I started this post I Googled tartar sauce recipes just to see how other people do it. I found dozens, each one of them a little different from the one before, all of them wrong. Evidently there are a bunch of cooks out there who have never actually tasted tartar sauce.

Tartar sauce, in my expert opinion, is absolutely necessary for any kind of fried fish and it's pretty good with baked fish. Oh, and a fish sandwich without tartar sauce is a sandwich that isn't ready to eat.

In the past, long ago and far away, I used to buy tartar sauce. Specifically, Kraft. Unfortunately, tartar sauce is really expensive for how little you get in the standard squeeze bottle. I like lots of tartar sauce on my fish, just like I like lots of ketchup/catsup on my french fries and cocktail sauce on my shrimp.

The beauty of my recipe is that I can make just enough for a fish dinner and not have a tiny bit leftover sitting in the fridge for a year. It's also reasonably cheap and it's the simplest tartar sauce recipe ever.

If you want, you can add all kinds of things: minced onions, garlic powder, lemon juice, parsley or even Dijon mustard, but three ingredients is all you really need.

So without further ado:

Homemade Tartar Sauce

1 Cup mayonaisse

1 Tbsp. dill pickle relish

1 tsp. horseradish

Mix, chill, ready to serve.

Of all the recipes I found, not one included horseradish. I don't understand. How can you have tartar sauce without horseradish? Every single recipe I found for cocktail sauce contains horseradish. Horseradish and seafood belong together. Like horseradish sauce and a roast beef sandwich. Like horseradish sauce on a Ruben.

No. Thousand island does not belong on a Ruben. I don't know who started that, but it's wrong. Like putting mushrooms and celery in Texas roadhouse-style chili. Like making spaghetti with ketchup. Like putting steak sauce on a good rib-eye steak.

By the way, if you need cocktail sauce, just add horseradish to ketchup. And some Sriracha chile paste if you have it. Easy. Horseradish.

There are many uses for horseradish. Wasabi on sushi. Most wasabi in the US is just horseradish with green food coloring. Hot mustard on egg rolls. And spring rolls. Horseradish gives hot mustard its heat. People used to put it on hot dogs and maybe still do in Chicago. They put everything on a hot dog in Chicago.

So, that's my tartar sauce recipe. Because I'm frying catfish for dinner. Although a good old-fashioned hot dog with everything sounds pretty good. Soon we'll talk about sauerkraut.

Stephen P.