Skip to main content
Sauce

Horseradish Sauce

A sauce made with onion, horseradish, anchovy essence, thickened with batter, finished with lemon pickle or juice.

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

Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the onion in a little fish stock until it becomes soft.

  2. Add the grated horseradish and essence of anchovies.

  3. Beat the mixture over a fire and thicken it with a little batter.

  4. Finish with lemon-pickle or lemon-juice, warming it gently.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softened in stock to build a mild, savoury base for the sauce.
Grated horseradish
Provides the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Essence of anchovies
Adds a deep, salty savouriness to the sauce.
Batter
Thickens the sauce to a smooth, coating consistency when heated.
Lemon-pickle or lemon-juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Thickening over heat. Batter thickens by starch swelling as it heats, so the mixture must be beaten over a fire to stay smooth. If it overheats or is not stirred, it can scorch or clump.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, horseradish. 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.

More horseradish sauce recipes

Hot 21Russian 6Cream 3 See all 297 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesHorseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes