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Horseradish Sauce

A creamy horseradish sauce made with mustard, cream, vinegar, and grated horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a bowl, mix mustard, salt, cream, and vinegar.

  2. Add grated horseradish until the sauce reaches your desired thickness.

Whip and fold

  1. In another bowl, whip the heavy cream until stiff.

  2. Mix the remaining ingredients and gradually fold them into the whipped cream.

Serve

  1. Serve on baked ham.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream
Whipped to stiff peaks, it gives the sauce its light, airy body.
Grated horseradish
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts the richness of the cream.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and aroma that complements the horseradish.

The step that matters

Fold gently into the whipped cream. Whipped cream is a foam held up by trapped air. Vigorous stirring deflates it, so the sauce turns dense and loose. Folding in gradually keeps the air and the light texture.

“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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