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Sauce

Horseradish Sauce

A sauce of onion, horseradish, anchovy essence, thickened with batter, finished with lemon or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the onion in a little fish stock until soft.

  2. Add the grated horseradish and essence of anchovies.

  3. Beat the mixture over heat and thicken with batter.

  4. Finish with lemon-pickle or lemon juice, warming it gently if using.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens into a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Grated horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat and aroma that define the sauce.
Essence of anchovies
Adds deep savoury flavour that rounds out the sauce.
Batter
Its starch thickens the sauce as it heats and beats.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Thickening with batter over heat. Starch in the batter swells and thickens only when heated, so the mixture must be beaten constantly over gentle heat. Stopping or using too much heat can leave lumps or scorch the base.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, horseradish, vinegar):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, horseradish, 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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