Name: Common Mustard
Ingredients: mustard flour; cold water; cream; salt; sugar; scraped horseradish; vinegar; Mountain wine

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Mix mustard flour with cold water, a little cream, salt, and sugar.
Boil scraped horseradish with vinegar.
Add half as much Mountain wine, sifted sugar, and salt to the mixture.
Combine with mustard flour to achieve a proper consistency and cover tightly.

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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together743 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,609 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, flour, cream, sugar, vinegar, wine):

Horseradishthe original
Shallotfits about as well
Radishfits less well
Beetrootfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, flour, cream, sugar, vinegar, wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.