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Salad

Common Mustard

A mustard sauce made with mustard flour, water, cream, horseradish, vinegar, wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Common Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mustard base

  1. In a bowl, mix mustard flour with cold water, cream, salt, and sugar.

Make the horseradish mixture

  1. In a saucepan, boil scraped horseradish with vinegar.

  2. Add Mountain wine, sifted sugar, and salt to the horseradish mixture.

Combine and cover

  1. Combine the horseradish mixture with the mustard mixture to achieve a proper consistency.

  2. Cover the mixture tightly.

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. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 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

Mustard flour
Forms the thick body of the sauce and carries the sharp mustard flavour.
Horseradish
Adds pungent heat that sharpens the sauce's flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the heat and sweetness of the sauce.
Cream
Adds fat that softens the sharpness and gives a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Combining the horseradish mixture with the mustard mixture. Mustard flavour develops and sharpens after its volatile compounds form when ground mustard meets liquid, and heat or acid change its intensity. Adding the hot horseradish mixture too early or too quickly can make the sauce harsh or change its texture, so combine gradually until the consistency is right.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Horseradishthe original
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Radishfits less well
  4. Beetrootfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, flour, cream, sugar, vinegar, wine. 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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