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Sauces for Roast Beef or Mutton

A creamy horseradish sauce with mustard, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Sauces for Roast Beef or Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grate the horseradish into a bowl.

  2. Add cream, mustard, and salt; mix well.

  3. Stir in vinegar and powdered sugar; mix thoroughly.

  4. Serve in a small tureen.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Horseradish root
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sharp heat of the horseradish.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, tangy bite that complements the horseradish.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the cream.
Powdered white sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity and sharpness.

The step that matters

Grate the horseradish and combine it promptly. Grating breaks the root's cells and starts the enzyme reaction that creates its sharp heat, which is strongest in the first minutes. Grating fresh and mixing in the vinegar promptly helps stabilize that pungency.

“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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