Name: Pepper Sauce
Ingredients: 25 peppers, finely chopped; 1 root of horseradish, grated; 2 tablespoons salt; 1 tablespoon mustard seed; 1 tablespoon cloves; 1 tablespoon allspice; a little mace; vinegar

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Combine the chopped peppers, grated horseradish, salt, mustard seed, cloves, allspice, and mace in a bowl.
Boil the spices in vinegar.
Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the pepper mixture and mix well.

Bottle

Transfer to bottles or jars and seal with corks.

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.

Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together654 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Peppers: Provide the bulk of the sauce and its main flavor and body.
Horseradish: Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Salt: Seasons the sauce and draws moisture from the peppers, helping preserve it.

Swap the mace

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

Tarragonfits better
Cinnamonfits better
Thymefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, horseradish, mustard, clove, allspice, vinegar. 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.