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Horseradish Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, cream, horseradish, salt, and sugar, served with boiled beef, mutton, or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Blend the butter and flour together in a saucepan.

  2. Add the cream and stir until smooth.

  3. Mix in the grated horseradish, salt, and sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled beef, mutton, or fish, fresh or salt.

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.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with the flour, forms the base that thickens the cream.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce by forming a starch-based roux with the butter.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and adds richness and a smooth texture.
Fresh horseradish
Supplies the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the cream and stir until smooth. Cold cream added to a hot butter and flour mixture can clump before it thickens. Adding it gradually while stirring lets the starch disperse evenly, giving a smooth sauce.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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