This some fantastic reading. Some insightful, some hilarious: "Steak tartare was not invented by Mongol warriors who tenderized meat under their saddles."

Maybe a confusion of tartar the sauce with Tatars the central Asian nomads?

There’s possibly something there though, even if the steak tartar version is incorrect. Bret Deveraux claims the aim was to preserve meat into a kind of jerky: “On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time.”[1]

His stuff is very well sourced, but also he’s self-admittedly talking outside his area of expertise there. So who knows.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/12/11/collections-that-dothraki-hord...

This is the first time I hear of this (https://xkcd.com/1053/).

I had always assumed they had the same etymology. It didn't help that in Spanish all of these words maintain the 'r' between the 'a' and 't': tártaro, ra, Tártaro, Tartaria.

Here there are 3 different etymologies: https://dle.rae.es/t%C3%A1rtaro and here there's another one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauce_tartare

Although I don't know if the Wikipedia article should be trusted, since the English version one (Tartar sauce) states: "The word Tartar is a Turkic word that is the name of Tatar people."

Huh! Also funny that the French wiki is so much more extensive. The quote from the English version is the complete section!

Seems like a western adaptation of tatziki or tarator sauce, plus some orientalist confusion over who to call “tartars”. Interesting stuff!