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Horseradish Sauce

A sauce made by stewing onion in gravy, adding grated horseradish, and serving over fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the onion in the gravy until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Grate the horseradish into the onion mixture.

  3. Stir well and serve over fish.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + fishtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Onion + fishtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Breaks down into a pulp, adding body and mild sweetness to the sauce.
Horseradish
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat released when the root is grated.
Fish or meat gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the onion and horseradish.

The step that matters

Grating the horseradish into the onion mixture. Horseradish heat comes from compounds released when the root is cut, and these fade with heat and time. Adding it to the hot mixture and stirring only briefly, then serving promptly, helps keep the sharpness.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, fish):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, fish. 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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