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Celery Sauce

Celery sauce is a pickled cabbage and onion condiment flavored with mustard, horseradish, spices, and celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage and onions finely.

  2. Pour hot brine over the chopped vegetables.

  3. After 24 hours, drain and press out the water.

  4. Loosen the mixture and add ½ cup of onions for every half gallon of cabbage.

Season and cover

  1. Mix in the brown sugar, mustard, mustard seed, horseradish, nutmeg, celery seed, turmeric, and black pepper.

  2. Add the chopped celery and mix well.

  3. Cover the mixture with cold vinegar.

  4. If available, add 1 pint of nasturtium seeds for extra flavor.

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 + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 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

Hard white cabbage
Forms the bulk of the relish, giving it body and a crisp, chopped texture.
Onions
Add pungent sharpness and savoury depth that mellows during the resting period.
White mustard seed
Provides sharp, pungent heat and a gentle crunch to the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its bite.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.
Cold vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the mixture and gives it tang.

The step that matters

Draining and pressing out the water after 24 hours. Salted brine draws water out of the vegetables, and pressing removes it so the sauce stays thick rather than watery and dilute.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, sugar, mustard, horseradish, nutmeg, celery, turmeric):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Cauliflowerfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, sugar, mustard, horseradish, nutmeg, celery, turmeric. 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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