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Horseradish Sauce for Fish

A savory sauce made with onion, horseradish, anchovy essence, butter, lemon juice, and salt.

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 for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the onion in a little fish gravy until it can be pulped.

  2. Add the grated horseradish and essence of anchovies.

  3. Beat the mixture over a fire and thicken it with butter.

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

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. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  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
Stewed and pulped to give the sauce its body and mild sweetness.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and thickens it into a smooth, glossy texture.
Essence of anchovies
Adds a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.
Horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury flavours.

The step that matters

Warming the sauce gently after adding lemon. Acid and heat can curdle or thin a butter-thickened sauce, and heat also dulls the sharp volatile pungency of horseradish. Warming gently keeps the emulsion smooth and the horseradish bite lively.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, horseradish, butter. 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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