Name: Salad or Piquante Sauce for Cold Meat, Fish, Ec.
Ingredients: 1 ounce scraped horseradish; ½ ounce salt; 1 tablespoon prepared mustard; 4 teaspoons minced shallots; ½ teaspoon celery seed; ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper; 1 pint burnet or tarragon vinegar

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, Ec.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Pound together the horseradish, salt, mustard, shallots, celery seed, and cayenne pepper.
Gradually add the burnet or tarragon vinegar.

Steep and strain

Let the mixture stand in a jar for one week.
After a week, strain the sauce through a sieve.

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).
Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together602 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together901 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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.
Burnet or tarragon vinegar: Adds acidity and carries the flavors of the herbs into the sauce.
Mustard: Adds pungency and helps emulsify and hold the sauce together.
Shallots: Contribute mild onion-like sharpness and aroma.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand in a jar for one week. Steeping lets the vinegar slowly extract and blend flavors from the horseradish, shallots, and spices. Rushing this step leaves the sauce harsh and unbalanced, because the pungent compounds mellow only gradually over time.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, mustard, shallot, pepper, tarragon):

Capersfits better
Dillfits better
Thymefits better
Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, mustard, shallot, pepper, tarragon. 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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Salad or Piquante Sauce for Cold Meat, Fish, Ec.