Name: Salad or Piquante Sauce for Cold Meat, Fish, &C.
Ingredients: 1 ounce scraped horseradish; ½ ounce coarse sea salt; 1 tablespoon prepared mustard; 4 teaspoons minced shallots

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Salad or Piquante Sauce for Cold Meat, Fish, &C.

Ingredients

1 ounce scraped horseradish
½ ounce coarse sea salt
1 tablespoon prepared mustard
4 teaspoons minced shallots

Directions

Make the sauce

Pound together the scraped horseradish and coarse sea salt.
Add the prepared mustard and minced shallots, then mix until well combined.

Serve

Serve with cold meat or fish.

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.

Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together859 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Horseradish + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together376 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).