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Dressing for Oyster Cocktail

A thin sauce made from lemon juice, onion juice, tomato ketchup, horseradish, Tabasco, salt, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dressing for Oyster Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the lemon juice, onion juice, tomato ketchup, grated horseradish, Tabasco sauce, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add vinegar gradually until the mixture reaches a thin sauce consistency, then mix well and adjust seasoning to taste.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Ketchup + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomato ketchup
Provides the base body, sweetness and tomato flavour of the sauce.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Lemon juice
Contributes acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds further acidity and thins the sauce to the desired consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar gradually. Vinegar is added in small amounts because its acidity is strong and the sauce thins quickly; adding too much at once can make it sharp and watery, so tasting as you go keeps the balance right.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, tomato, ketchup, horseradish, sauce, vinegar):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, tomato, ketchup, horseradish, sauce, 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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