Name: Mustard Sauce
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon mixed mustard; maitre d'hotel sauce

Why it works: Mustard and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,120 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

1 teaspoon mixed mustard
maitre d'hotel sauce

Directions

Prepare maitre d'hotel sauce.
Stir in the mixed mustard.
Serve with pickled herrings or on its own.

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.

Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,120 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

Mixed mustard: Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Maitre d'hotel sauce: Provides the base sauce that the mustard is stirred into.

“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.