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Fine Horseradish Sauce

A creamy horseradish sauce made with grated horseradish, salt, cream, vinegar, and optional garlic or shallot vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and garlic 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 ↓

Fine Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, wipe, and scrape the horseradish root until free from skin.

  2. Grate the horseradish on a fine grater until it becomes a pulp.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the grated horseradish, salt, cream, and vinegar until smooth, stirring the vinegar in gradually and mixing briskly.

  2. Add garlic or shallot vinegar 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Horseradish + garlictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Horseradish + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together483 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Cream + garlictop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Rich cream
Adds fat and body, softening the sharpness of the horseradish.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the flavour and helps keep the sauce tangy.

The step that matters

Grating the horseradish. Grating breaks the root's cells and releases its pungent compounds, which give the heat. Acid and cream then mellow that heat, so the sauce is best judged after mixing rather than during grating.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, cream, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Garlicthe original
  4. Dillfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, cream, 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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