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Sauce

Worcestershire Sauce

A fermented vinegar-based sauce made with cayenne pepper, mustard seed, cloves, mace, shallots, garlic, horseradish, and brown vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Worcestershire Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine all ingredients in a jar.

  2. Stir the mixture every day for a month.

Finish and rest

  1. After a month, boil the mixture and strain it.

  2. The sauce will be ready to use in a week.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. 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

Shallots
Add savory sweetness and aromatic depth as they steep in the vinegar.
Brown vinegar
Provides acidity that extracts and preserves the flavors of the other ingredients.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent heat that mellows during steeping.
Cayenne pepper pods
Adds capsaicin-driven heat that builds gradually as the mixture steeps.
White mustard seed
Adds pungency and sharpness that infuses into the vinegar over time.

The step that matters

Daily stirring for a month. Stirring keeps the solids evenly in contact with the vinegar so flavors extract uniformly. Without it, ingredients can settle and steep unevenly, leaving some parts of the batch weaker or harsher than others.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, clove, shallot, garlic, horseradish, 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.

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