Name: Horseradish Sauce
Ingredients: 1 onion; 1 cup fish or meat gravy; 2 teaspoons grated horseradish

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

1 onion
1 cup fish or meat gravy
2 teaspoons grated horseradish

Directions

Stew the onion in the gravy until it becomes a pulp.
Grate the horseradish into the onion mixture.
Stir well and serve with fish or meat.

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.

Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,784 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Fish + horseradishtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together178 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
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, giving the sauce body and a mellow sweetness.
Fish or meat gravy: Supplies the liquid base and savoury flavour that carries the sauce.
Horseradish: Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.