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Sauce

Horseradish Sauce

A sauce made by soaking bread, garlic, and horseradish flour in cream, then sieving and seasoning with salt, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 719 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak the bread, garlic, and horseradish flour in the fresh cream for 3 hours.

  2. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Stir in the coarse sea salt, sugar, and vinegar.

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. Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked 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

Fresh bakers' bread
Soaked in cream to thicken the sauce and give it body.
Garlic
Adds a pungent aroma that complements the horseradish.
Horseradish flour
Supplies the sharp heat and pungency that defines the sauce.
Fresh cream
Forms the base of the sauce, providing richness and a smooth texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Passing the mixture through a fine sieve. Sieving removes solid bits of bread and garlic so the sauce turns smooth. Pressing the soaked solids thoroughly also extracts more flavour and body from them.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, garlic, horseradish, flour, cream, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, garlic, horseradish, flour, cream, sugar, 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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