Skip to main content
Sauce

New York Counts Oyster Sauce

A thickened sauce made from tomato ketchup, hot water, tarragon vinegar, horseradish, butter, flour, and optional Tabasco or cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,099 recipes mention both. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

New York Counts Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix together the tomato ketchup, hot water, tarragon vinegar, and grated horseradish.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter and brown it slightly.

  3. Add the flour to the browned butter and stir for a moment.

  4. Pour in the mixed ingredients and cook until the sauce thickens smoothly.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold, adding Tabasco or cayenne if desired.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tarragon + horseradishtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together743 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

Tomato ketchup
Provides the main body, sweetness and tomato flavour of the sauce.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances the sweetness of the ketchup.
Grated horseradish
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its character.
Butter
Adds fat and nutty, browned flavour when melted and cooked until lightly browned.
All-purpose flour
Cooks with the browned butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the mixed ingredients to the roux. Flour thickens only when cooked in fat before liquid is added. Pouring in the liquid and cooking until it thickens gently helps the sauce become smooth rather than lumpy, since starch granules swell and set as the mixture heats.

Flavor stand-ins for the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ketchup, tarragon, vinegar, horseradish, butter, flour, sauce):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Mustardbetter flavor fit
  3. Beetrootbetter flavor fit
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ketchup, tarragon, vinegar, horseradish, butter, flour, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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

Horseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes