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Sauce

Cold Meat Sauce

A horseradish and mustard sauce for cold meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Cold Meat Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound together horseradish, salt, mustard, garlic, celery seed, and red pepper.

  2. Add tarragon vinegar and mix well.

Steep and strain

  1. Let the mixture stand in a wide-mouthed stoppered bottle for 7 to 10 days.

  2. Strain through a sieve or coarse cloth before serving.

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. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Horseradish + tarragontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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.
Tarragon vinegar
Acidity that carries the flavours and preserves the sauce during steeping.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and blends during the steeping period.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharpness and helps emulsify and round out the sauce's heat.

The step that matters

Steeping in a stoppered bottle. The mixture must stand for the full 7 to 10 days so the sharp flavours of horseradish and garlic mellow and meld with the vinegar. Keeping the bottle tightly stoppered holds in the aroma and protects the sauce from contamination while it steeps.

Swap the garlic

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, mustard, clove, celery, pepper, tarragon, vinegar. 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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