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Sauce

Hot Horseradish Sauce

A hot sauce made from grated horseradish, brown gravy, made mustard and vinegar, with optional salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Hot Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the grated horseradish with the brown gravy.

  2. Let the mixture stand by the fire until it is nearly boiling.

  3. Add salt if needed.

  4. Add the made mustard and vinegar.

  5. Alternatively, stew the horseradish in vinegar for 10 minutes.

  6. Drain the horseradish.

  7. Mix the horseradish with ½ pint of thick melted butter.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + garlictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.
Brown gravy
Supplies the liquid base and savoury body for the sauce.
Made mustard
Adds sharpness and a little heat to balance the richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and mellows the horseradish's bite.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, mustard. 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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