Skip to main content
Sauce

Horseradish Sauce

A creamy sauce made with horseradish, cream, salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, and lemon juice.

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

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Whip the cream until fairly stiff.

  2. Stir in the grated horseradish, salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, and lemon juice.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together529 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Radish + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Radish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Whipped to fairly stiff peaks, it gives the sauce a light, airy body that holds the horseradish.
Grated horse-radish
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the horseradish's sharpness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and fresh citrus brightness that lifts the flavour.

The step that matters

Whip the cream until fairly stiff. Cream that is under-whipped stays runny and thins the sauce, while over-whipping turns it grainy and can curdle it into butter. Stopping at fairly stiff peaks gives a body that holds its shape when the other ingredients are folded in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horse, radish, cream, pepper, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against horse, radish, cream, pepper, 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.

More horseradish sauce recipes

Hot 21Russian 6Cream 3 See all 297 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes