Skip to main content
Main

Horseradish Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, milk, cream, horseradish, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until smooth.

  3. Add the cream and milk, then season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  4. Cook until thick, then remove from heat.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir in the horseradish. If too thick, thin with a spoonful of cream.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Adds richness and a rounded flavor, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture, and can be used to loosen the sauce.
Horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent flavor that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the horseradish off the heat. Horseradish's pungent compounds are volatile and break down with heat, so adding it after removing the sauce from the heat keeps its sharp flavor strong.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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.

More horseradish sauce recipes

Hot 21Russian 6Cream 3 See all 297 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes