Skip to main content
Main

Clam Cocktail Sauce

A sauce made from lemon juice, horseradish, onion, Worcestershire, Tabasco, ketchup, peppers, and seasonings, served with clams.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup 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 ↓

Clam Cocktail Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Juice the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Add horseradish, grated onion, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, sweet Spanish peppers, green peppers, black pepper, and coarse sea salt, then mix well.

Serve

  1. Cut the grapefruit in half and remove the core from each half.

  2. Place 4 small clams in each grapefruit half.

  3. Top with the sauce.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the ketchup's sweetness.
Ketchup
Provides sweetness, body and a tomato base for the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the clams.
Clams
Supply the main seafood element, served chilled in the grapefruit halves.

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, horseradish, onion, sauce, ketchup, pepper, clam):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, horseradish, onion, sauce, ketchup, pepper, clam. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHorseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes