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Horseradish Sauce

A savory sauce made with horseradish, onion, flour, vinegar, and stock, served hot with soup or meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, heat the fat and fry the onion until brown.

  2. Add the flour or cracker meal and grated horseradish, stirring well.

  3. Gradually add the hot soup stock or water, mixing until smooth.

  4. Stir in the remaining ingredients and cook for 5 more minutes.

  5. Adjust seasoning with more horseradish, sugar, or vinegar if desired.

  6. Alternatively, mix horseradish, vinegar, salt, pepper, and sugar into a white sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with soup 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.

  1. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Horseradish + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour or cracker meal
Thickens the stock into a smooth, body-rich sauce.
Grated horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sharp horseradish flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of horseradish and vinegar with sweetness.
Fat
Carries the onion flavour and helps it brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Adding the stock gradually. Adding hot liquid slowly while stirring lets the starch in the flour or cracker meal disperse evenly, so the sauce becomes smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, horseradish, vinegar, clove, pepper, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, horseradish, vinegar, clove, pepper, 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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