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Horseradish Sauce for Roast Beef

A creamy horseradish sauce made with mustard, vinegar, cream, shallots, salt, and grated horseradish, served with roast beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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 ↓

Horseradish Sauce for Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine mustard, vinegar, cream, shallots, and salt.

  2. Grate fresh horseradish into the mixture until it reaches the thickness of onion sauce.

  3. Mix well and serve with roast beef.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the cream's richness.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that complements the horseradish's heat.
Fresh horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Grating the horseradish to the right thickness. Horseradish loses its pungency and bite as it sits, and its volatile compounds are released when cut or grated. Grating it into the mixture and adjusting the amount until it matches onion sauce's thickness controls both the heat and the texture, so the sauce is neither too thin nor too hot.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Radishfits about as well
  2. Shallotthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Broccolifits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, vinegar, cream, horseradish. 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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