Skip to main content
Main

Horseradish Sauce

A sauce made with bread crumbs, vinegar, horseradish, paprika, powdered sugar, thick white sauce, French mustard, salt, and pepper.

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

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 ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the ingredients in the order given, stirring in each one before adding the next.

  2. Heat the mixture over hot water until very hot.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the other flavours and gives body.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the sauce and add body as they absorb liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sharp horseradish flavour.
French mustard
Adds sharpness and depth that complements the horseradish.

The step that matters

Heating over hot water. Gentle heat over hot water warms the sauce without boiling it. Overheating can cause a cream or egg-based sauce to separate or curdle, and it can dull the horseradish's pungency.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, vinegar, sugar, sauce, mustard, pepper):

  1. Horseradishthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, vinegar, sugar, sauce, mustard, 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes