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Hot Horseradish Sauce

A spicy horseradish sauce made with gravy, mustard, vinegar, butter, spices, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Prepare

  1. Mix grated horseradish with brown gravy and let it stand by the fire until nearly boiling.

  2. Add salt, made mustard, and garlic or eschalot vinegar (or substitute with common vinegar).

  3. Optionally, stew horseradish in vinegar for 10 minutes, then drain and mix with melted butter.

  4. In a small bowl, combine cayenne pepper, salt, and sugar.

  5. Pour in lemon juice, Harvey's sauce, mushroom catsup, and port wine; mix thoroughly.

Heat and serve

  1. Heat the sauce by placing the bowl in a saucepan of boiling water.

  2. Serve immediately with meats like geese, ducks, roast pork, or venison.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 heat that defines the sauce.
Brown gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the horseradish.
Made mustard
Adds sharpness and a pungent bite that complements the horseradish.
Port wine
Contributes sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smoother, fuller texture when used.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce over boiling water. Gentle indirect heat warms the sauce without boiling it. Direct high heat can break emulsions such as melted butter and dull the volatile pungency of horseradish, so heating slowly keeps the sauce smooth and sharp.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, mustard, butter, pepper, sugar, lemon, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, mustard, butter, pepper, sugar, lemon, sauce. 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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